Orlando Golf - Course, Resort and Package Information

Some of the more charming aspects of northwest Florida are found in the string of seaside villages that punctuate the coast between Destin and Panama City Beach. Sunning themselves against the powdery beaches of the Gulf of Mexico these hamlets of angular and colorful homes along old Highway 30A - more Providence than Panhandle - seem almost too clean and perfect to be inhabited. They are places so quaint you find yourself asking, do people really live here?

This almost surreal environment is not an illusion - or maybe it is. Towns like Seaside, Rosemary Beach, WaterSound, and WaterColor are in fact master planned communities where every detail is blueprinted and the lifestyle flows through a choreograph of shops and avenues. There's more than a little irony that "The Truman Show," a movie about a man who's life is scripted for television, was filmed in Seaside, itself a produced, made-for-man creation.

If these towns didn't come about in the organic way that most traditionally do, if the city founders can be reached by telephone rather than researched in history books, they nevertheless reflect everything coastal about the region and are highly modernist visions of living at the beach. Marketing aside, communities such as these are evocative of a peaceful life in a brilliantly beautiful setting.

As an amenity to its concept towns of WaterSound and WaterColor, owner/developer St. Joe/Arvida of Jacksonville hired golf course architect Tom Fazio to construct Camp Creek Golf Club, which opened in spring 2001. Like its neighbors Camp Creek directly relates to the themes of its environment and seems quite at home amid what appear to be extensions of the oceanside dunes. It too, however, is a unique creation.

The course is built on a flat parcel of land originally covered with scrub vegetation, weedy pines, and flatwoods - not at all unlike the topography of a dozen or more nearby courses. While the site's natural landforms were neither invigorating nor distinctive, those were the qualities that St. Joe/Arvida wanted in its golf course.