Arnold’s Adventure mini golf - Eastham, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 67/100
Would we play this course again? No.
Should you play this course? No.
The Takeaway: Arnold’s is a bustling hot spot of activity, featuring mini golf, ice cream, seafood, beer, and about 12,000 people on vacation. In other words, it is a microcosm of Cape Cod. While it’s not a bad course by any means, Arnold’s suffers from a lack of vision and is unable to stand out in a crowded field of mini-golf courses in this stretch of Massachusetts. There are some decent holes on the course, and it checks the box on use of pirate props (legally-required for mini golf on the Cape) with a pirate ship, pirate, and parrot dressed as a pirate. Yet despite the course name, Arnold’s comes up short on adventure. The course layout feels confined, and not just because in the summer you will find it crawling with people. The putting is somewhat tedious and mundane. If it’s nearby adventure-style golf you seek, head a few minutes further down the road to Cape Escape. If you’re willing to drive further, you’ll find even more delightful adventures at Wild Animal Lagoon.
A Typical Hole at Arnold’s Adventure Mini Golf in Eastham
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Arnold’s Adventure Mini Golf is an 18-hole outdoor mini golf course located on Cape Cod in Eastham. For those unfamiliar with Cape Cod anatomy this is just past the elbow of the Cape. The course is the central feature of a small complex that includes a restaurant with indoor and outdoor dining, and a building serving up ice cream. The course is located directly on Route 6 and most noticeable by a large pirate ship and/or a full parking lot.
Pirate Ship at the Entrance to Arnold’s Adventure Mini Golf
Arnold’s was packed on the weekday afternoon that we showed up. After breezing through a mini golf round at Poit’s Lighthouse and being the only people on the course at Wellfleet Dairy Bar, both located just north up the road, we thought our luck would continue. It did not.
One of our favorite things to ask employees at mini golf courses is whether they get busy, sometimes in an attempt to understand business ebbs and flows, sometimes just to make conversation and open the door to further discussion. On the Cape in the summer this is a ridiculous question nearly warranting a slap in the face, so you have to narrow it down to something moderately more intelligent like “how busy have you been today?” A question like this invites much quasi-scientific speculation from workers, including musings on recent weather cycles, temperature, relative humidity, ocean temperature, lobster prices, moods (both local and national), economic GDP, and a dozen other metrics.
On the day we played we were told it had been very busy, perhaps because the rain from earlier in the morning had finally cleared. Also it was a Monday and those wishing to avoid notoriously horrific Sunday Cape traffic by staying one extra day were trying to squeeze in one last family fun activity before getting into the car and returning to real life. As we looked around we estimated that a full half of the population of Massachusetts had elected to visit this course today. So we mentally prepared for a very slow round and took our place behind a line of people waiting to tee off.
The first few holes were pretty repetitive. Putt down a short hill and navigate around some rocks. Putt up a hill and navigate around some rocks. Putt around a corner and navigate some rocks. We entertained ourselves in between holes by studying the small model buildings encased in protective plexiglass that dotted the course (see the rare non-prop windmill below). As someone who appreciates a well-constructed scale model, these were interesting, albeit incongruous with the implied roadside promise of a pirate-Adventure mini golf course.
Not Your Typical Mini Golf Course Windmill
To some of the basics: the course uses mostly tin-style cups (with plastic grates at the bottom and lighting), and rug-style putting surface (we still need to learn the official name of this type of turf). Borders are primarily sturdily installed brick, occasionally making use of natural stones in limited areas. Tan-colored rug was used for some sections to simulate bunkers/sandtraps, and a deep-pile type dark green rug surface was used to simulate maxi-golf rough in some areas.
The greens were generally putt-able with very few runs, rips, or annoying micro-breaks capable of unexpectedly swerving a golf ball hard in one direction. There were only a minimal number of tin cups with damaged or poorly installed raised-lips at the edges capable of deviating your putt at the last second.
We saw some familiar hole designs here, including the putt-through-the-log hole. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve seen this one, but we can only imagine the guy who came up with this idea gets high-fives around the mini golf design office on a daily basis and/or has new employees whispering after he leaves the room (“…that’s Dave…You know the log hole? He came up with it…I heard he put his kids through college with that log).
If this review sounds uninspired thus far it’s because it’s mirroring the course itself: there is really not that much wildly noteworthy or memorable about this course. There are positives though. The landscaping is quite nice, making use of a variety of flora and fauna (Or is it just flora? What do these words mean again? We thought using them would make us seem intelligent). For example see the nice plants above.
Perhaps the pinnacle of the this course is the 18th hole, which is a nice UTWTYA hole (use-the-water-to-your-advantage hole) in which you can either stick to the greens or sink your putt into a little river and let the water do the work and hopefully deliver you an ace. This is another hole design that pops up all over the place. And if people weren’t already bowled over by designer Dave’s fresh bold thinking on the putt-through-the-log hole (PTTL), when he came up with the UTWTYA hole he basically exploded people’s brains and they had to cancel work at the mini golf design company for a month while they raced around to find replacements for all the workers whose brains got exploded. Make no mistake, we wish we were Dave.
If there’s one core gripe it’s that this course has placed their biggest and best prop right on the road. It makes sense from a business standpoint, but to these mini golf reviewers we see a lot of flash but not much substance. The true workhorse engine of the course is not pirates and adventure, but bricks and rocks and miniature scale-model historical structures. Understandably that doesn’t get most people fired up, so you’ve got to build a pirate ship to bring people in. And on a deeper level, aren’t we all placing our proverbial pirate ships along our front entrance as plumage? We don’t show up to first dates unwashed and in sweatpants. Instead we forage for clean underwear, brush our teeth, shower, and trot out our most well-adjusted and sociable personalities. Because if we don’t, we’ll die alone (or go out of business, if you’re a mini golf course).
The actual highlight for us during this round was watching the family a few groups ahead of us play—a group that included a dad and presumably his three young daughters. Perhaps this was the mom’s two hour window of vacation freedom during which to get some beach time in alone or visit a spa, or perhaps mom is not in the picture, or perhaps she was away on assignment for her gig as a hitman, it doesn’t really matter. What did provide entertainment was watching these kids climb all over the course and each other while the dad tried to reign them in before gradually resigning himself to the fact that this mini golf outing would involve very little putting and mostly just chaos. All this is perfectly summarized in the picture below, wherein three kids crawl all over the green and try to fish a ball out of a parrot prop while the dad looks on, bemused but also moderately broken. This picture should be featured prominently on every Cape Cod tourist brochure.
APPENDIX
One amusing additional highlight was that when we stepped up to the first hole a middle-aged guy in the group ahead of us who was waiting around to tee off looked at us and loudly proclaimed: “Who shows up at a mini golf course with their own putters?”
“Pros,” one of use responded, deadpan.
Silence.
And while true pros we are not (see the video above), this man may have also been disgusted to know that not only did we have our own putters but we were in only the early stages of a depraved Cape Cod golf binge that would see us visit another 10 courses in the next 24 hours. The horror. And thus it was that after we finished our round at Arnold’s we barrelled down the road to Cape Escape in Orleans for more mini golf.