Customer Reviews
What You'll Get
Since great aunts cannot resist pinching dimpled cheeks, the overwhelming number of dimples on a golf ball should confuse their grabby hands, defeating them once and for all. Drive dimpled dandies back into their holes with today's Groupon: for $30, you get a 12-punch card for driving-range balls at The Links at Carillon, located in Plainfield (a $60 value).
The Links at Carillon, listed as one of the best golf resorts on Route 66 by Golf Digest, dedicates 10 acres to an expansive driving range and short-game area outfitted with a chipping and putting green. Each punch of the driving-range card grants golfers approximately 60 balls, ready to take to the skies and land on or around one of the range's several flagged target greens. Swingers can choose to go all natural with real grass launch pads or feel the reverberation of artificial grass tees, and can tote clubs brought from home, rented from The Links, or stolen from an easily distracted caveman. Equipped with 12 to 15 hitting stalls and open year-round from 6 a.m. until dusk, the driving range offers ball launchers a practice schedule as flexible as Jim Carrey's face.
The Fine Print
Promotional value expires Apr 18, 2012. Amount paid never expires. Limit 1 per person, may buy 2 additional as gifts. Must redeem pass in full by 4/18/12. Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.
About The Links at Carillon
In 2005, Golf Digest named The Links at Carillon among the best courses on Route 66—the highway artery that connects Chicago to L.A. and has famously served as inspiration for uncountable odes to middle-American life. Perhaps it's fitting, then, that the facility's three nine-hole sides are named the Red course, the White course, and the Blue course. Each enfolds golfers in a test that demands such all-American traits as creativity (on diversely shaped bent-grass fairways), concentration (on undulant greens), and stick-to-itiveness (necessary to locate one's golf ball among the thousands of Easter eggs littering each lake bed).
Then again, it might just be happenstance. After all, each course adheres firmly to the links style of golf course design, a mode of landscape architecture that owes more to the Scottish lowlands than to Oklahoma's Dust Bowls. Hallmarks of such courses include few trees, deep bunkers, and lots of water—features with which golfers become intimately familiar as they string any combination of sides together for full 18-hole rounds.