Paradise Family Golf - Middleton, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 78/100
Would we play this course again? No.
Should you play this course? Yes.
The Takeaway: A well-executed adventure-ish-style course nestled among a golf complex with various driving ranges and chipping greens. Well laid-out and maintained with a gentle adherence to a loose tiki-esque, island-paradise theme that is refreshingly pirate-free (with perhaps the exception of a trash-talking parrot on the last hole). The course gets the fundamentals right, and offers up a few holes that stand out above the rest. Not overly challenging or mind-blowing, but still enough to make for some competitive fun with your wife, kids, or mistress. This is a solid course that handily beats out its adventure-style neighbor Castle Creek located in nearby Salem.
Paradise Family Golf in Middleton
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Paradise Family golf is an 18-hole outdoor mini golf course located in Middleton. It’s part of a small complex that includes the mini golf course, a chipping and driving range, and an ice cream place. The course is tucked off a bustling Route 114 in Middleton. It’s not readily seen from the road, but take the turn by the Mobil gas station and you’ll find the course at the end of that short industrial-looking street.
The entrance to Paradise Family Golf
First impressions suggest this course is well-looked after, well-constructed, and of modern design. On the day we played it was a bustling hive of activity, with many young mini golf patrons that appeared to be on very awkward first or second dates. Fortunately, we managed to find a little pocket with few people ahead of us or behind us that allowed us to play at a nice moderate pace for taking plenty of pictures, deliberating the merits of the course, and making many terrible putts.
The initial stretch of mini golf starts off promisingly enough with some holes that aren’t too complicated or challenging but that are well conceived nonetheless. These holes involve navigating basic banks shots and some elevation changes and undulations. Early on we discovered that this is a course that makes use of helper-style holes; that is, holes that provide a generous concave area around the hole that slopes toward the cup and makes for easier play. While we don’t mind this on a few holes, anything more than that and the mini golf becomes too sympathetic and un-challenging.
There is nothing overly noteworthy or mind-blowing through the first 5 holes. For the 6th hole you take a short hike up to a wooden tiki hut-like platform structure. This is a three-tiered hole and after teeing off you descend back down the steps to the final green which is on ground level. It’s not an amazing hole, but the structure itself is pretty cool and nicely supports the rustic island paradise (think “Gilligan’s Island”) theme of the course. This hole also provides a nice little scenic vantage point to look out over the course and generate some excitement for the remaining 12 holes to come. Or you can use it as a platform from which to heckle kids playing below that are roughly 1/3 your age.
Continuing on, the 8th hole is a plinko-style hole, one of those “just-wack-the-ball-and-hope-for-the-best” types. While it’s nice to play holes that require thinking (and overthinking) and some strategy, it can also be a relief to play these kinds of holes. Just like how sometimes (or for a decade straight, who’s counting?) you just want to come home from work and turn off your brain and watch terrible shows on Netflix, sometimes you just want to step up to the ball and hit it and then throw your putter into the well-manicured bushes.
What’s nice about this course is that it mostly gets the fundamentals right: The greens are in good condition (they’re a turf-style green, different than the carpet-style green we also see…one of these days we’ll get the industry names/models of these types), the perimeter blocks are uniform and free from defects, there are not cumbersome starting mats, and the signage for each hole is clear. Sure, some of the cups don’t match, and the helper-holes detract from the challenge, and there are a couple rough green spots around a cup or two, but given what we’ve seen in our travels playing mini-golf across the state, course fundamentals here get an A grade.
What is also nice here too is the quality of the landscaping and the generally clean appearance of the place. Clearly there is some pride in ownership here and it shows, from the well-maintained little tropical theme buildings, to the various wooden fences in good condition, to the clean and vigorously flowing water.
Back to the mini golf, the 10th hole is a quirky one that bested both of us. It features a secondary hole up on a hill; miss this and your ball may (or may not) roll back to a trough that will shuttle your ball down to an inferior lie. The 11th hole is a “use-the-water-to-your-advantage-hole” (“UTWTYA” going forward), on which you can choose to bank your ball into the river and ride the river into a metal funnel that spits you out close to the hole. Unfortunately there are some technical difficulties with this funnel system, and after banking it into the water our ball just bobbed around in the water near the entrance to the metal funnel that takes you to the holes. If this sounds complicated, it’s not, we’re just lousy at explaining simple things. This defect detracted from this hole a bit. At Cafe Sarina down the road there is a better version of this UTWTYA-type of hole that worked flawlessly.
The 13th hole was a fun one. A finesse type hole that requires you to land it in a v-shape rock area that carries your ball back towards the hole, which is blocked by a rock and inaccessible from the front. Again, these types of holes are a nice break from the “just-hit-it” mini golf holes.
In general, strategy on this course requires you to do only minimal aiming or strategizing on your first shot. You’re basically just trying to put it close to the hole for a short second putt, and there is not much to prevent you from doing this. The hole length at this course does tend to be on the longer side, necessitating some strong first putts. But there are relatively few opportunities to really screw yourself and embarrass yourself in front of your date, or kids. Even holes with sunken areas looming off to one side, or bunker-colored rough adjacent to the hole really don’t strike too much fear into the player’s heart. Thankfully holes like the 13th provide the opportunity to give a player a 5 or 6-putt if they play it poorly and thereby inject some much needed fear into our undersized cold hearts.
Closing things out, the 17th is a fun obstacle-course style finesse hole. You need to go over a triangle shaped peak carrying hardly any speed so that you can down the back side and then up a mound surrounding the hole and (hopefully) drop into the hole. Neither of us managed a hole in one here, despite taking many practice swings and doing much deep meditation/visualization before teeing off (no one was behind us…though at this point in our mini golfing we would not care if there were a dozen angry patrons or more staring holes directly in the backs of our stupid heads).
Unfortunately the 18th hole is a throwaway ski-ball style bonus hole…however it’s bolstered by a trash talking parrot that makes a sassy remark when you miss the bonus hole. Side note, we watched the two teenage girls ahead of us walk up close to the protective grate on the hole and then roll their balls into the bonus hole to win a free-round (or it could have been an ice cream…we forget).
In closing, this is an above-average and pleasing course. It’s well-maintained and well-constructed. And while it’s not the most challenging or mind-blowing of mini golf courses, it still provided a few engaging, puzzle-like holes. It’s nice that the course features a generous hole length which made the round feel spacious and airy. This course would be perfect for an evening round of mini golf on a date, or with kids who still need to be tired out for the day. If we lived in the Middleton area we would probably visit this place again to play a round of mini golf then hit the driving range, and cap it all off with an ice cream. That said, we do not live in Middleton and there is much mini golf yet to play in this Commonwealth so we forge ahead to all those remaining courses far and wide. Fare thee well, Paradise Family Golf.
APPENDIX
In a departure from usual “Appendix” musings on the miniature golf course we’re reviewing, we’ll instead review the 18th “bonus” hole dishonesty that seems to run rampant in the mini golf world. It seems given the opportunity to win something, teenage (and younger…and probably older too) minds are unable to resist the urge to “cheat.” Cheat is in quotation marks because it seems that the magnitude of deception involved is so low as to warrant them: this type of cheating has nothing in common with cheating on the SATs or your wife of 14 years. And yet, cheating it is.
And this 18th hole subterfuge is something we’ve confirmed in conversations with various mini golf course owners. On honor-system holes that do not feature electronic alarms/alerts people will say they made the bonus putt for a free round, yet the owner will check the separate “free-round” catchment container (visible only to them) that collects these winner balls and see no actual ball in there resulting in a conundrum wherein you either call the patron a liar, or just let it slide and give them a free round (and eventually you do away with any bonus prize whatsoever because you’re sick of facing this quandary). Alternatively even with some electronic confirmation system in use that alerts a worker of a made bonus shot, like at this Paradise Family Golf course, you have people just game the system and stick there hands under a grate to stuff the ball into the bonus hole.
An interesting psychological study could be made of the motivating factors that compel humans worldwide to cheat at mini golf bonus holes. What motivates them the most? Free rounds, ice cream, stuffed animals? Sheer competitiveness and the desire to “win”? Are people more or less inclined to cheat when playing with a date? Alone? On a Friday, or on a Monday? What about introducing a bonus hole with a guillotine guarding the hole instead of a metal grate? Would the sight of that cause people to question sticking their hands beyond the fair play line? We’re definitely not ratting anyone out, and we ourselves are well past the age of cheating on any 18th holes, but it seems there is much that could be learned about an individual from how they play 18th “bonus” holes.