In 2000, we built, owned and began operating Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf. A year later, we drew up plans to expand the golf course with a new railroad and bumper boats. The railway was to wind around a mountain, which would have hidden our house and a studio inside. As part of that plan, the Imagination Corporation would have become Giggle Ridge Studio Incorporated, and I would concentrate on concept design only from that point forward. I created the artwork for a new website, business cards and brochures and drew up the plans for the entire project, and we presented the concept to the park board where Giggle Ridge was located, but we could not agree on terms for a long lease. With that deal not possible, we instead bought our property in Yarrow and built our studio, shop and house there. Instead of putting away my tools, we would continue to design and build fanciful creations for customers far and wide. Looking back, this was the perfect plan.
Ambitious success
In a week or so, a long-awaited documentary about the construction of Disneyland will debut on Disney, and this afternoon I got to watch a preview. The show will showcase the construction and many of the very difficult challenges that surrounded it. The documentary is going to be well worth watching, and I look forward to it with great anticipation.
Watching the Disneyland preview reminded me of how it felt when we worked on our own, albeit much smaller-scale projects. First among these projects was Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf, which we built in 2000. The mini golf was exceptionally ambitious for our family and little crew, taking every ounce of our energy, labour and finances. Looking back, I vividly recall how that dream brought us to the financial brink before we opened the doors. Thankfully, the project was a success over time, and we thoroughly enjoyed operating it for well over a decade. When we decided to return to our roots and concentrate solely on customers’ theme projects, the sale of the Adventure Golf helped finance our new shop, state-of-the-art equipment and our new house. Once again, we plunged into a season of high debt, long work hours and considerable risk. But we firmly believed in our dreams, worked extremely hard, and over the next years prospered. A decade later, we plunged into the deep end once again to begin designing and building the Hazelnut Inn. That project is now nearing its spectacular completion and is already being enjoyed by guests from near and far.
The truth is that very few people truly understand the challenging, untold backstory or the decades of hard work when they peek over our fence or that of someone who realizes an ambitious dream.
Then came Giggle Ridge
After almost five years of working almost exclusively for West Edmonton Mall, it was time to do a project we had been dreaming of and planning for over a dozen years. The opportunity to locate in Cultus Lake, British Columbia first appeared on December 15, 1999. We made a deal to purchase an ancient mini golf, there since the 1940s. The half-acre parcel of land is ideally located in a busy recreational area. The golf was outdated and underused but had immense potential. The possession date for the property was noon on March 15, 2000. By five o'clock, that same day, the old golf was demolished and hauled away. Then the real work began. Our extremely ambitious goal was to build Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf in only one hundred days. Thankfully, we had twenty members of our skilled and experienced team to help us which made things a little easier.
During construction, the team cut, fit and welded over fourteen miles of steel. We tied thousands of sheets of galvanized lath into place. Thousands of cubic yards of soil and gravel were moved, shaped and then tamped into place. We carefully poured and troweled more than four hundred cubic yards of concrete and seven thousand concrete blocks. Two hundred and thirty litres of paint were hand-brushed and blended. We welded fourteen hundred square nuts onto the fence pickets - just for decoration. Many hundreds of feet of electrical conduits and underground piping were buried. More than three thousand-six hundred square feet of carpet was cut, fit and glued into place. Landscape design was done by world-famous gardener, Brian Minter. There were fifteen thousand annuals planted, plus all of the perennials, shrubs and trees.
Despite the spring of 2000 being unusually cold and wet, Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf officially opened on July 13, 2000 - one hundred and twenty days after we started.
