Lake George: Mini Golf
No matter what happens in my life going forward, our Labor Day weekend trip to Lake George will remain one of my favorite trips ever. The entire weekend was perfect—beginning with the diner stops on the way there, everything that followed was magical (not to mention the life-changing Magic Forest). We packed so many things into three days and it was the perfect end to a summer that flew by alarmingly fast. Every activity we did was summery, including not one, but two nights of playing miniature golf.
I can't remember the last time I played mini-golf, but it was probably when I was in Ohio and I was probably not an adult yet. I had almost forgotten how silly and fun it is, and how very bad I am at all sports, mini-golf included. The first night we went to the Around the World/US (18 holes for each) golf course, right across from Lake George. I wanted to see the World's Fair muffler man, which we did, before playing the Around the US course. Aside from some glaring inaccuracies (a Hoover Dam-themed course representing the wrong state), it was a really great course with just the right amount of kitsch and challenge.
In addition to the Bunyan muffler man, they also had a muffler man-esque Native American, a big lobster, the classic windmill, a surfer, Florida orange, Vegas roulette wheel and Colorado Rockies. The 18th hole was a New York subway station—with a real subway bench and a replica train car—that you actually went underground to play. I was unnecessarily excited to do so—considering we both spend a large portion of our lives in actual subway stations—but there was something weird and wonderful about being in one on a mini-golf course upstate.
Our last night in Lake George was spent playing Goony Golf, which we saw as we were driving around town our first day and knew we needed to play. If you have to pick only one mini-golf place in Lake George, I would go with Goony. It was colorful, whimsical and more stylistically cohesive than Around the World, although it was much more crowded.
I loved all of the brightly-colored concrete figures and hand-painted signage. Goony Golf is slightly newer than Around the World, but still has a vintage kitsch appeal in its simplicity and whimsy. My favorite was definitely the Goonysaurs, which we saw from the road, but was even better up-close with its glowing eyes and big bone cane. Even the trash cans were whimsically topped with clown heads. If heaven exists for me, I imagine it can't do much better than to resemble the Magic Forest, with a side of Goony Golf.