Grey Goatee Golf and Travel

The back nine, especially, at Storey Creek Golf Club feels like a walk through the deep woods. There are plenty of holes from which you have no view of the course’s civilized amenities. It’s quiet, and cool, and breathtaking. In that setting, there is bound to be wildlife, and there was, but the biggest creatures — deer — were abundant and hardly wild at all.

They were so tame, in fact, that it did no good to shoo them away, and they live in no fear whatsoever of golf balls aimed up the golf course, no matter how close they land. They’re Canadian deer, you know. They’re just different.

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Lucky Lager isn’t good enough to worry over much, but it’s interesting so see what engages the Grey Goatee Research Cabal. Beer, apparently. They really

Get Lucky.

don’t like having to paper over the misstatements of the boss, but hey, get a real job then.

Our crack fact-finders looked into Lucky’s international corporate history — and by “looked into” we mean they lifted their heads, or one of them did, long enough to mumble something to Siri. We wrote something about Lucky originating, as far as we knew, in the other Vancouver, in Washington state, but that was only a stop along the way for Lucky in a history dating to 1934.

If nothing else, the diggers found, this beer, this brand, is a survivor. When Lucky first hit the streets, it was made by General Brewing Co. in San Francisco. It was an American beer (and in fact was brewed in Vancouver USA from 1950 to 1985; then in Tumwater, Wash., home of Olympia Beer) until the brand was acquired by Labatt’s of Canada, and was even made in Victoria until 1982 … so, OK … our researchers do get tired, and confused, and cranky, so we’ll cut to the present. The Lucky brand in Canada is owned by the mega-huge AB InBev corporation, and that seems about right for a beer like Lucky.

We Road Trippers learned, by keen observation, that Lucky is to Vancouver Island as PBR is to Portland, Ore., and other hipster locales – cheap, plentiful, bearable when it’s really cold. The kids love it.

The Lucky with the maple leaf on the label is 5.0 percent alcohol; it was almost certainly 3.2 percent when it was a stateside brew. Luckys are easier to choke down when you know you don’t need six of ‘em to catch a buzz.

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We booked our tour of the Queen’s island through the folks at Golf Vancouver Island, and it was seamless. Joshua Duncan, our direct contact at Golf Vancouver Island, had an answer to everything we threw at him and couldn’t have known that Crown Isle Resort no longer has a cognac ‘n’ cigar lounge in the main building. We were forced to slip out onto the patio of our ground floor digs for a smoke with a view — of the No. 1 fairway and the leisurely spaced groups working their way down the gentle dogleg-right par-5. It worked.

We know we left some island courses unplayed, including Bear Mountain in Victoria, site next month (Sept. 23-25) of the Pacific Links Bear Mountain Championship, a  Champions Tour event. That could force a trip back northward, sooner rather than later.