Want to wear out your passport? Just follow Russell Knox, world traveler

Russell Knox had hoped to play in the TOUR Championship in August but unfortunately, he bowed out of the FedExCup Playoffs after just one event.

Not to worry. His wife Andrea had a pretty good back-up plan just in case Russell was available. She had arranged a trip for the couple, along with fellow PGA TOUR pro Brian Stuard and his girlfriend, to Peru.

The highlight of the vacation was a trip to Machu Picchu, a 15th century Inca citadel painstakingly constructed 7,970 feet in the air on the top of a mountain ridge, then abandoned a century later. Knox calls it the crème de la crème of Peru.

The ancient fortress was built using a technique called “ashlar,” where the stones are cut to fit together without mortar. And those stones either pushed up the mountain or chiseled out of it – no wheeled carts were used to transport them.

“The Incas were much smarter than I am,” Knox said with a grin. “Just the level of architecture, the way they designed and moved the big rocks and shaved them down and fit them all together. I mean to say it was pretty impressive.”

The two couples took a train and a 20-minute bus ride to their hotel at the top. Other sightseers opt to hike the Inca Trail, a four-day trek, to get to Machu Picchu -- but no matter how you get there, the experience is something special.

“It’s incredible to see it,” Knox says. “And when you do see it for the first time, it's like, I mean, how could people have built this? It was really amazing.

“… It’s definitely a trip we’ll talk about forever.”

Knox already travels a lot playing golf – last year he played in 12 different states and seven countries – but he and his wife enjoy exploring new places. He admits he may have taken it for granted when he was a kid growing up in Scotland and his parents took him to sightsee in Europe.

The travel is almost therapeutic, a great distraction from the job.

“My wife, she's a big influence,” Knox says during a break from a practice round prior to the season-opening A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier a few weeks ago. “… She always wants to do something, like this morning we did the Bunker Tour here at the hotel. So that was cool.

“She's always encouraging me to do something rather than just golf because after 10 years of doing it, if you're just golf, it can wear you down. You’ve got to take advantage all the amazing places you go. … I mean if you're in North Carolina or whatever and there's a waterfall to go see, just go do something.”

The Knoxes have a map of the world in a room of their home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. And as many pins as they’ve stuck in countries they’ve visited, the couple knows there is so much more to see – so much that Knox is on his second passport and Andrea is about to get another one, as well.

Last summer, Knox and his wife went to Greece, visiting the Parthenon and Acropolis in Athens and chilling out on the cliffs on the volcanic island of Santorini. Combined with PGA TOUR and European Tour events, they flew from Florida to China to Turkey to Greece to Dubai and finally to Australia.

“I'm built for long plane trips,” Knox says. “You get the luxury of lying down, sleep, watching the movies. Getting served great food. So, I don't really mind it.”

Rome and the Amalfi Coast was the destination the previous year, which Knox says may have been the best trip ever. Then he pauses. There’s Machu Picchu, after all, and he almost forgot about the three-day safari they went on after he played in the Nedbank Challenge in Sun City, South Africa.

“That was terrific, too,” he says. “I didn't know if I was going to enjoy it as much as I did and to this day it was maybe that was probably the best trip we've ever done.”

The couple stayed in tented suites – Knox called it “glamping” -- at Jaci’s Lodge on the Madikwe Game Reserve in Zeerust, South Africa. On the daily safaris, they managed to see four of the Big Five – lion, rhinoceros, elephant and Cape buffalo.

The leopard, though, proved elusive. As dusk was falling, a guide spotted one that had just killed a baby impala and alerted the others on the radios. Knox’s group worked its way over to where the leopard had been spotted but just saw the dead animal at the base of a tree.

“We're kind of waiting for it to show up but of course the guy was too smart and waiting for us to leave,” Knox recalls. “So, then we came back a little bit later right before dark and the leopard had moved the impala up a tree, hadn't eaten it yet.

“So, then it really got dark. So we had to leave. The guide was like, we're leaving, we don't want to be out of here at dark. And we came back in the morning -- carcass.”

Knox also got video of two giraffes fighting, using their necks, which average 6 feet long, as weapons. The battles, appropriately called “necking,” generally happen when a giraffe is trying to establish dominance during mating season.

“At first, we just thought they were playing, and I mean, they take their big heads and their necks and they just like whack each other,” Knox says. “And we just thought they were kind of having fun. But our guide was like, no, they're trying to knock each other over. …

“We wanted to kind of ride the fight out, see what would happen. But after like 20 minutes, it kind of slowed down a little bit. But it was pretty interesting to see that in alive in nature.”

Knox’s contribution to the safari was spotting the hyenas – “we had gone a few days and I’d seen nothing, … so I was proud of myself.” He and his wife, much to her initial consternation, also rode a zip line that was almost a mile long while they were in South Africa.

“You’re up high and you went head-first,” Knox says. “I strapped in my wife – she was not happy to do it. We kind of forced her into it. That was pretty cool. … I keep saying I would like to bungee jump or sky dive, but I haven’t gotten there yet. But we’ll see.”

Never say never where Knox is concerned.