Imagine yourself stuck indoors tasked with typing brilliant prose about the best, newest golf GPS product, Approach G5. Outside, a nightmarish rain/hail/snow concoction is dumping down on Garmin headquarters closing every area golf course for the foreseeable future. Sure, there is the odd 60-plus degree day where you can sneak out of the office to slap a few Titleists around. But for those sorry souls like your humble author, the long winter slog can tear apart dreams of golfing grandeur one salty snowplow at a time.

Thankfully, the Approach has one very cool feature that allows golfers living north of the Mason-Dixon line to live vicariously through PGA players, and that’s the “Preview” page. This week, your shivering author will be flipping through the Pebble Beach Preview page, hole by hole, as the pros play it. Not only is it a cool way to see courses you might (hopefully) play one day, it’s also fun to see the distances the pros have for each shot. In between sips of hot cocoa, yours truly will be using the Touch-Targeting feature to see just how far JB Holmes hit his drive, or how far Mickelson needs to hit it to carry the bunkers on #17.

It’s a pittance to actually playing golf with the Approach, to be sure. But for snowed in golfers from Montana to Minnesota to Maine, it does offer a bit of medicine for the cabin fever we’re suffering through. Be sure to tune in next week to Caddy Confidential where we’ll be posting another YouTube video about the Digital Scorecard feature. Weather permitting…