Twenty-Eight Thousand Square Feet, and Nobody Has to Drive to Hermitage Anymore
In July, we wrote that a family entertainment center was taking shape inside the old Bargain Hunt on North Mt. Juliet Road, and that when it opened it would end a very specific Wilson County ritual: the rainy-Saturday drive to Nashville, Hermitage or Hendersonville in search of skee-ball.
That drive is over. Good Clean Fun! opened its doors over Labor Day weekend.
What is actually in there
The building at 1241 N. Mt. Juliet Road runs to more than 28,000 square feet, which is a great deal of room to fill and they have filled most of it. The centerpiece is an 18-hole blacklight mini-golf course. Around it: an arcade, duckpin bowling, a 7D interactive ride, and private rooms for birthday parties and corporate bookings. Snacks are available on site.
The detail most likely to matter to a parent is the pricing structure. There is no cover charge to walk in the door. You pay as you go, for whatever you actually decide to play.
That is a meaningfully different proposition from the admission-gate model most indoor entertainment centers run on. A family can walk in, play three games and a round of mini-golf, and leave without having pre-committed to a per-head wristband price on the way through the turnstile. For anyone who has paid full admission for a four-year-old who then spent the afternoon in the ball pit, the distinction is not academic.
Duckpin bowling, briefly explained
Duckpin is worth a word, because a lot of people will walk past the lanes without knowing what they are looking at. The pins are shorter and squatter than tenpins and the ball is small enough to hold in one hand — no finger holes, roughly the size of a large grapefruit. You get three rolls per frame instead of two, which sounds generous until you try it.
It is a genuinely difficult game and an unusually democratic one: upper-body strength buys you almost nothing, so an eight-year-old and a grandfather can play the same frame on something close to even terms. It is also a regional oddity more associated with the mid-Atlantic than the mid-South, which makes finding lanes in Wilson County a small surprise.
The gap it fills
Mt. Juliet has spent two decades adding rooftops faster than it has added things to do inside them. The city grew into one of the fastest-expanding in Tennessee on the strength of schools, commute times and subdivisions, and the indoor-recreation math never quite kept up. Every all-weather birthday party option sat twenty to thirty minutes down I-40.
Filling a vacant big-box with 28,000 square feet of it is a reasonable answer to that, and a reasonable second life for a building that had been sitting empty. Retail vacancies in a growing town tend to become either storage or somebody's idea; this one became the second.
Make an evening of it if you like — there is no shortage of places to eat within a few minutes of the door.
