"At 2:37 pm, March 29, 1998, a land mass suddenly appeared some two miles out to sea from Myrtle Beach Pavilion. Two days later, the mass had settled itself atop the old Chapin Company department store, two blocks from the ocean… The Mass was a miniature golf resort, some 50,000 years old, which had broken away from the sunken continent of Atlantis and inched its way to the United States over thousands of years." - The Mt Atlanticus websiteNow, if there’s one thing I admire, it’s a good creation myth, and this is as good as they get. Even before I read the promo, though, I knew I had to play this miniature, er, make that minotaur, golf course. "Look!" I cried. "They’ve got two sea monsters in the lagoon!" And sure enough they did – but that was only the beginning. Dodo birds, giant Venus flytraps, ostriches, a fountain of youth, an ice cave, and, of course, a flesh-eating minotaur are just a few features of this divertingly nonsensical course played on no fewer than three levels, indoors and out.
There are actually two 18-hole courses, a standard feature of the larger mini-golf establishments. Both begin in the former department store, in a series of rooms featuring murals so surreal that Salvador Dali would be hard pressed to do better. The murals are loosely based on the Atlantis myth, with several depicting the evolution of a creature half minotaur, half golfer: the minotaur golfer. One in the style of M.C. Escher was a favorite, a little universe within a universe of minotaur golf.
Another mural featured a crowd of naked people waiting to be beamed up to a mother ship. This made me wonder: Could alien beings actually transport us to another galaxy? If so, would we have cell-phone coverage?
Not many people were out on a December afternoon playing minotaur golf, so we’d soon zipped through ten holes (we don’t keep score) and were stuck behind a family of four with two small and painfully slow children. No matter. We reversed direction and played minotaur golf backwards, playing each hole several times to find that sweet shot yielding a hole in one.
We liked this place so well that we opted for the day pass and played both the Minotaur and Conch courses several times – or should I be honest and say we played the parts of the courses we liked best multiple times. There’s a tricky water shot that kept us occupied a full twenty minutes. At closing time, we were down to one ball between the three of us, my husband and son having managed to send their balls into the lagoon. My moment of glory came when I putted right through the most difficult maze, sending my ball smartly into the hole. Mom RULES!