SOUTHAMPTON, NY – If you had taken the Long Island Rail Road from Midtown Manhattan to US Open on Friday morning, it would take you about 2 hours and 30 minutes to reach the Shinnecock Hills pop-up station. If you had driven or hailed an Uber, it would have been more difficult to estimate your travel time, due to the notorious unpredictability of the Long Island Expressway coupled with the noise that has drowned out the Montauk Expressway in the area around the club. Biking roughly 90 miles? Google Maps reports that the transport would have taken you about 8 hours.
Skateboards and pogo sticks aside, there was at least one other form of transportation that could have gotten you out Shinnecock: helicopter. That’s how my colleague, Darren Riehl, and I traveled to the US Open on Friday, courtesy of the passenger service company Blade Helicopters. Our bird: a motor with a motor Zile 407 with room for two pilots and five passengers. Flight time to the South Fork: 40 glorious minutes, no traffic jams.
That luxury doesn’t come cheap: $1,480 for a one-way ticket, or roughly the cost of five second-round shares, with about $150 left over for food and merchandise. But, man, is it one ORDER to travel. Darren and I arrived at Blade’s West 30th St. heliport lounge, right across from the Hudson River, around 7:45am. There is no queue. No TSA. No worries. I was on the 8am flight; Darren was one flight behind me, at 8:15. After a quick (free!) espresso at the bar overlooking the track, I was called to the exit of the lounge, where my four US Open buddies and I left for our cart, its blades already in motion.
The next actions happened quickly: seat belts were snapped, the door was closed and locked, phones were pulled from pockets with cameras at the ready. Rise. Five feet, 10, 50, 100. Within seconds, all of Hudson Yards was in front of us and the Hudson River below us. Still climbing, we headed north, much of Midtown now in view. Empire State Building. Chrysler. The 1,550-foot Central Park Tower. Then came Central Park itself, a 51-block green space. Then The House That Ruth Built (the new age version of it, anyway), before we started moving east towards Long Island Sound.
A few minutes later, more footage. Out the window to my left: the stunning waterfront and sprawling estates of Long Island’s Gold Coast, where Gatsby ran wild. To my right, Westchester County, New York, and to its east, Connecticut.
;)
Alan Bastable
The view also made for exceptional viewing of the golf course. Sands Point, a Tillinghast the course dating back to 1928 was down there. Such was Glen Cove and Huntington, The Creek’s sand areas — and about a dozen other golf courses I’ve seen, some in backyards.
Soon we were heading south on the Montauk Highway (a reminder of what a grueling trip it could have been!). The charming nine-hole layout at Quogue Field Club appeared followed by the beachfront mansions of the Hamptons. Shinnecock Bay came next. And then we began our descent to a grassy area on Shinnecock Indian Nation land, just south of the golf course, where another helicopter and lounge awaited us.
