Last week I was in Alberta for meetings in Calgary, Edmonton and points in between. I made a quick side trip to Drumheller, mainly out of curiosity. I hadn’t been there since our kids were little, more than 40 years ago. Things had obviously changed a great deal, but one thing was obvious to me. As a designer and builder of mini golf courses, I saw the town as the perfect place to build such a facility. There were plenty of hotels and tourist businesses. A quick internet search informed me there are more than a million visitors annually, with young families being the main demographic. My visit prompted me to search through my stored files for a concept drawing created a quarter century ago for just such a project. We don’t have the bandwidth to expand our operation to include such a venture, but if someone out there does, we would love to design and build it for them.
A fun walk down memory lane
Today, I’m visiting West Edmonton Mall, home to Professor WEM’s Adventure Golf, Galaxyland and a whole lot more. We spent about five years at the mall, back in the late 90’s, re-theming the five-acre indoor theme park and the golf, and many other smaller projects. While much has changed in the mall and the theme park, the golf remains the same. The Marine Life area is still there, but most of the other projects we did through the mall have long since disappeared. The staff at the Mall has kept things well maintained, and it was a pleasure to see our work holding up after almost three decades of heavy use. As I walked around, memories flooded back of our wonderful crew and the good times we had. The work was challenging, but the team was up to the task and then some. Those were the days!
Moose Mountain project
In 2005, I received a call for a new, exciting project to be built in the Mall of America in Minnesota. It was a mini-golf course on the third floor of the mall. The owners flew me down to the mall to look at the site, which overlooked the large theme park below. As I recall, I had two weeks to dream up and draw up the plans before I travelled back to present them to the mall management. The concept was loosely based on Minnesota’s logging history with lots of fun. The management loved the ideas and gave the project the green light. We were to build all the features and signs, while the ‘mountain’ and infrastructure would be constructed by a Minnesota company specializing in rock work. Over the next few months, we kept busy in our shop creating giant features. Each time a truckload was ready, we loaded a semi, and I travelled down to oversee the installation and ensure the on-site construction lived up to the concepts. It was a challenging, exciting and fun project without a doubt, and it was a success that is still there twenty years later.