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Texas tees.

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From Ben Hogan to Ben Crenshaw, Byron Nelson to Tom Kite, Texas has produced more than its share of championship golfers. Here the traditions and the love of the game run deep, a wide variety of courses rank among the best in the country, and the weather is grand. All these assets make it clear why the Lone Star State has evolved into one of America's greatest golf destinations.

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND In a state as big as Texas, your options for a great golf vacation are practically limitless. For year-round fun in the sun on the Texas Gulf Coast, you can hardly beat the beautiful South Padre Island Golf Club, the only course in Texas with five holes on Gulf waters. Home to the Texas Senior Open, the championship links here offer two distinct nines, the front nine running close to the waters of the Laguna Madre, which are often teeming with thousands of shorebirds, and the back nine cutting through the dense South Texas brush country, where a late-afternoon round might well add a bobcat sighting to the day's golf highlights. For still more fun, saltwater anglers often find the best redfish and speckled trout fishing just offshore from the golf course.

The club has two- and three-bedroom on-site rentals, or the staff can arrange South Padre lodging packages with the Radisson, the Sheraton, or another of the beachfront hotels. For much of the year, the total cost of lodging, golf, and greens fees is well under $100 per person, making this one of the greatest bargains in all of golf.

AUSTIN AND SAN ANTONIO If the goal of your vacation is to sample a wide variety of great golf, tasty food, and fine Texas hospitality, you can hardly beat the double-bill destination of Austin-San Antonio, which together offer more than eighty golf courses and three of this writer's favorite golf resorts. You can't go wrong in Austin. With four championship designs--two by Tom Fazio and one each by Ben Crenshaw and Arnold Palmer--Austin's Barton Creek Resort and Club is the premier golf destination in Texas. Located fifteen minutes west of town, the resort has three hundred lap-of-luxury guest rooms with dramatic views of the Texas Hill Country, a spa and pool complex, and service to match.

But what brought me to Barton Creek was its Golf Advantage School at the new golf institute, which I hoped would give me a few more birdies and a lot fewer double bogeys on my weeklong Central Texas golf vacation. Located at the practice facility of the nationally ranked Fazio Canyons Course, the school has separate practice areas for full swing, short game, and trouble shots, plus all the latest high-tech bells and whistles, like stop-action computerized video analysis. What I...

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