Every second year the men in my family do a golf trip. It started as just me and Dad, then Uncle Rob invited himself, then Dad’s mate Steve heard about it, and now it’s a committee. This year the committee argued for three weeks and settled on Vietnam: Saigon, Danang and Nha Trang, six rounds in six days, booked as one package through TGROUP so that nobody had to think about a transfer, a tee time or a hotel ever again.

Dad is 68. I want that on the record before you read any further, because he played all six courses and only sat out nine holes the entire week — which is nine fewer than Steve, and Steve is 51.

On the last night we sat at a plastic-table beer place near the beach in Nha Trang and held our traditional awards ceremony. The prizes were beers. Here is the official record of proceedings.

Day one is sneaky on this itinerary. You land at Tan Son Nhat around mid-morning, the driver is already waiting, and 40-odd kilometres later you’re on the first tee at Vietnam Golf & Country Club in Thu Duc still smelling faintly of aeroplane. It’s a lovely old course, proper trees, water everywhere — and jetlag does not respect water. I gave the fish three balls on the front nine alone. Dad, who slept the whole flight like a professional, parred two of the first five and didn’t let it go all week.

An hour and twenty in the van out to Dong Nai, and I’ll be honest, at 7am there was some muttering from the committee. Then you get there and it’s island greens and fairways running beside these winding waterways, and the muttering stops. Watching your ball roll along next to the water while you decide whether to be brave is most of the fun. Steve was not brave. Steve was in the water.

Day three starts with the one genuinely unglamorous bit of the week: zipping up travel bags at 6am and checking golf clubs onto a domestic flight. Worth it, though, because Danang Golf Club is about ten minutes from the airport — we landed, and by late morning we were playing a Greg Norman course that runs through actual dunes. Dad grew up on links golf and went quiet in the good way. “This is proper,” he said, twice, which for Dad is a eulogy. Hard, fast, wind off the sea; I lost the plot on the back nine and didn’t much care.

Montgomerie Links sits just off China Beach, ten minutes or so from where we were staying, 7,090 yards of championship course that looks gentle in photos and then quietly ruins you. Steve found sand on seven different holes. Seven. By the fifth one Uncle Rob had stopped commiserating and started filming. The greens were the best we putted on all week though, and being 20 minutes from Hoi An means you finish your round and you’re eating by lanterns on the river that same evening, which does a lot to heal a scorecard.

You take a boat across Nha Trang Bay to get to this one, which already had Dad grinning like a schoolboy. Par 71, laid out along white sand with the bay behind almost every green, and by the time the light went gold on the closing holes we’d all quietly stopped writing numbers down. Special honourable mention to Diamond Bay the day before — a proper test with the wind coming off the sea — where Dad finally took his nine holes off and sat on the terrace with a coconut, entirely unashamed. Six rounds in six days is a young man’s schedule and he gave it five and three-quarters.

Every clubhouse, every airport, every 6am start — the van was already there, cold water in the cupholders, clubs loaded before we’d finished paying for coffee. The whole week ran off one WhatsApp thread and at no point did four grown men have to organise anything, which if you knew the committee, is the real championship result.

The land package came out at a shade under 39 million dong each for the week — six courses, all the hotels and every transfer between them — and on the flight home the committee voted it the best trip we’ve done. Would we play all six again? I said yes. Dad said five. Steve said he’d bring more balls.

If your family has a committee of its own, TGROUP were the ones who kept ours from falling apart — tell them honestly how many rounds your knees have in them and they’ll build the week around it.