The Rainy-Saturday Drive Is Over. It Ends at a Blacklight Golf Hole.
For as long as anyone in Mt. Juliet can remember, the rainy-Saturday problem had exactly one solution, and it involved a car. Skee-ball, a prize counter, a birthday party in a back room with pizza grease on the tablecloth — the whole apparatus of an American childhood weekend lived somewhere else. Hermitage. Hendersonville. Out toward Nashville, with the family loaded up and everyone hoping Interstate 40 was in a generous mood.
That drive ended at ten o'clock on Saturday morning.
Good Clean Fun! Family Entertainment Center opened its doors for the first time on Sept. 5, timed to land in the middle of Labor Day weekend, and it filled a very large and very empty building with ultraviolet paint and arcade light. The address is 1241 N. Mt. Juliet Road, in the Valley Center just off the main north-south spine of town.
A big-box shell gets a second life
The building matters as much as what went into it. More than 28,000 square feet of it was the old Bargain Hunt — the kind of wide, high-ceilinged retail box that empties out and then sits, lights off, while a town grows up around it. Reusing a shell like that is a quietly practical move. It buys an enormous amount of floor space without waiting on a ground-up build, and it takes a dark storefront off a busy road, which is the sort of thing a city notices even when nobody puts out a press release about it.
Inside, the square footage has been spent on things that glow. The centerpiece is an 18-hole blacklight mini-golf course, ultraviolet-lit and painted wall to wall. Around it sit a full arcade of video and redemption games — the ones that spool out tickets you carry to a prize counter — plus a dark ride billed as a 7D interactive attraction, an interactive pixel floor, and private party rooms built for the birthdays and team gatherings that Mt. Juliet families have been booking a county away.
There is no cover charge at the door. Visitors pay as they go, by game and by attraction, which means a family can walk in for twenty minutes or settle in for an afternoon without buying into the afternoon first.
Eighteen months, and a hunch about the neighborhood
The place is the work of owner David Cahill, who spent more than a year and a half getting it from idea to open door. His read on the market was straightforward and, on the evidence of Saturday's crowd, correct: this corner of Wilson County is thick with families and thin on indoor places for them to go together. He has said he is not aiming only at small children, either — the pitch runs through teenagers and young adults and out the other side to grown-ups who never entirely gave up the arcade.
Anyone who watched the buildout will recognize the ending. When we wrote about the project in July, the crews were still working and there was no date beyond “later this year.” Those are the ones that usually slip. This one didn't.
What it means for a city that keeps growing
Mt. Juliet has spent a decade turning from a bedroom community into a place with its own gravity — retail along Providence, distribution and industry out toward the interstate, and a steady stream of restaurants and shops that residents once had to leave town to find. An indoor entertainment anchor is the logical next entry on that list. Ballfields and parks are wonderful until it is 96 degrees, or February, or pouring, which in Middle Tennessee is a meaningful share of the calendar.
The hours are built for that reality: Monday through Thursday, 4 to 10 p.m.; Friday, 4 to 11; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to 10.
Looking for more to do close to home? Start with our guide to things to do with little kids in Mt. Juliet.
