I do not usually write about my own trips. I am making an exception for this one.

A good friend of mine owns a ranch out in Kansas, and recently he invited me to come along on a golf trip with him and six other guys. Eight of us all together. We spent the first night at his place, then drove north to Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska.

That is the ranch. I walked out in the morning and these three were standing there looking me over like I was the one who did not belong, and I suppose I was.

I brought a camera, of course. Thirty years in and I still have not figured out how to go somewhere beautiful and leave it in the bag.

If you are a golfer you have probably heard the name. If you are not, you probably have not, and that is by design. Sand Hills is about as private as a club gets. It sits way out in the middle of the Nebraska sand hills where there is not much of anything else, it has never needed to advertise itself, and it is still rated one of the best courses in the world. It earns every bit of it. The golf was unreal.

What I was not ready for was the sky. Every evening out there put on a show. Wide open country, nothing to block it, and the color would just keep going and going.

We were sitting down to dinner one evening and the sky started to go. Anybody who has spent time out in open country knows that a sunset like that does not wait on you. It builds, it peaks, and then it is over.

So I told the guys to get ready, we were going to do a group photo out on the balcony in about a minute.

I ran and grabbed my tripod, set it up, put everybody where I wanted them, set the camera on a timer, and then hustled around and dropped into the chair on the far left just before it fired.

That was it. The whole thing took about two minutes. Nobody's dinner got cold and the conversation never really stopped.

And now all eight of us have that.

I think about how often a moment like that gets away from people. Not because it is hard, but because it feels like an interruption, or because somebody has to be the one to stand up and say let's do this right now. Two minutes. That is what it cost us.

Sometimes a few minutes is all it takes to capture something that gets remembered for a lifetime.

Dinner wrapped up and I stepped back outside. There was a storm working way off in the distance past the cabins we were staying in, and the lightning was going. The lights were on all the way down the hill.

I set up and waited for it. Some nights the country just hands you things.

The golf was everything people say it is, and I am grateful I got to play it.

But that is not the part I keep coming back to. The friendships I have made through golf over the course of my life are priceless. This whole trip happened because a friend thought of me and picked up the phone.

The photographs are just how I hold onto it.