The Bargain Hunt Is Gone. In Its Place, a Pirate Course That Glows in the Dark.
For years, the honest answer to “what is there to do indoors in Mt. Juliet on a rainy Saturday?” involved a car, an interstate, and somebody else's ZIP code. That answer changed over Labor Day weekend.
Good Clean Fun! opened its doors at Valley Center, just off North Mt. Juliet Road, filling 28,000 square feet that used to be a Bargain Hunt. Owner David Cahill spent more than a year and a half planning it, and the finished list reads like a wish list assembled by somebody who actually asked kids what they wanted: an arcade mixing modern video games with ticket-redemption machines and a prize counter, an 18-hole blacklight mini-golf course done up as a pirate adventure, a 7D interactive motion ride, interactive floor games, snacks, and several private party rooms available for birthdays, team nights and corporate gatherings.
The detail that matters most to a family of five is the one at the front door: there is no cover charge. You walk in free and pay as you go, per game and per attraction. That is a meaningful difference from the wristband model, where a household commits forty or fifty dollars a head before anyone has established whether the seven-year-old will actually last two hours.
Why 28,000 square feet was sitting there in the first place
There is a small piece of local economic history buried in that address. Mt. Juliet spent the better part of two decades as one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee, and the growth arrived in a particular order: houses first, then grocery stores, then the big-box retail that followed Providence Marketplace when it opened in the mid-2000s and rewrote where Wilson County shopped. What the sequence tends to leave out, and leave out for a long while, is the category that has no obvious anchor tenant — the indoor place you go when it is 38 degrees and raining and the children have been inside since Thursday.
Meanwhile, the retail that arrived early began aging out. A discount chain vacates, and a well-located box with high ceilings and a large parking field sits empty — which is exactly the kind of space an entertainment center needs and cannot usually afford to build from scratch. Blacklight mini-golf in particular wants what an old retail store has in abundance: wide open floor, no windows, and height. The building was, in a roundabout way, waiting for this tenant.
A city that keeps adding front doors
It is worth noticing how much of Mt. Juliet's recent character has come from places built for gathering rather than for buying. Charlie Daniels Park carries the name of a fiddle player who lived here for decades and is still the town's informal center of gravity on a warm evening. Market Night returns to that park on Tuesday, Sept. 15, with vendors and live music and nothing at the gate. A 28,000-square-foot arcade off North Mt. Juliet Road is a different species of the same instinct — somewhere to go, with people, that is not a screen at home.
The city has long been described as the one between the lakes, which is a lovely thing to be from April to October and a slightly less useful identity in February. Good Clean Fun! is, in the most literal sense, a February building. It just happened to open in September.
