Arnold Palmer's Bay Hill Club & Lodge

Bay Hill is the course Arnold Palmer bought in 1974, lived next to for the rest of his life, and quietly reshaped over four decades. Dick Wilson laid out the original 27 holes in 1961 along the Butler Chain of Lakes in southwest Orlando, but what you play today is Palmer's course: rebuilt greens, refined bunkering, conditioning standards calibrated for a PGA Tour stop. The Arnold Palmer Invitational has been played here every year since 1979.

You're playing the Champion and Challenger nines, the championship routing used for the Invitational, at 7,381 yards with a course rating of 75.2 and a slope of 137. The difficulty is structural rather than gimmicky. Fairways are generous enough to accept a confident swing, but the approach angles narrow when your tee shot finds the wrong side. Palmer believed in courses that rewarded bold play and penalised timidity, and that conviction is in the routing.

The finish separates the course from anything else in Orlando. The 16th, 17th, and 18th play along and across the lake, ending at the par 4 with water down the entire right side where Tiger Woods holed out from the fairway bunker in 2001. Conditioning operates at Tour standards year-round; greens run true and at honest speeds, and the practice facility matches the pedigree.