In Which We Are The Old People At Kneiss’s Miniature Golf

I’m not a fan of golf generally. If you like it — hey, neat — but it’s always felt to me like a waste of time and space, with a huge economic (not to mention gendered and racial) barrier to entry.

But mini-golf? That, my friends, is the people’s game — and it is absolutely my jam. So, I took a ride up to the North Hills area of Pittsburgh with Fox and a couple of our pals to visit Kneiss’s Miniature Golf.

Kneiss’s is a roadside attraction that has a nice, compact layout and two different 18-hole courses. We opted to assay the “classic” course, which was less busy but still had a lot of cool and unique obstacles. The custom work on these courses is really impressive; you get the sense that a real person handmade each one.

A number of holes on the classic course had a nautical theme.

Here’s a closeup of the treasure trove on the same hole; I love the wealth of little details! (And as a homeowner, I also really appreciate how nice their landscaping work is, hahaha.)

The other course (which we did not try out) is the “creek course” — named for this creek. I don’t know what the cow statues are all about, but they’re pretty chill.

Further along the classic course, there was a “bumper car” hole, so of course we had to hop into one of the cars. (And I swear I’m not drunk in this photo; it was more a side-effect of the extreme humidity of the evening and my luxurious-but-cumbersome hockey playoff beard.)

Fox and I both managed to get ourselves stuck in an embarrassing number of the obstacles, but no instance of stuckery was more impressive than this one, where Fox managed to get her golf ball caught underneath this bowling pin windmill, freezing the windmill in place and almost burning out its motor. I feel like this is way more impressive than any hole-in-one. (This shot is blurry, by the way, because we were in a bit of a hurry and didn’t get a second try, for fear of actually burning out the windmill’s motor while we reset!)

We and our friends had a really fun time at Kneiss’s for slightly over eleven dollars for each couple; it’s a fun place for a date night — assuming you don’t mind being a 30-or-40-something surrounded by teenagers and folks with elementary school kids. I would have liked having a little more time to really admire the craftsmanship of each hole, but we had to move at a pretty speedy clip so as not to block the many other people who were there that evening. In the meantime, check the place out yourself; it’s one of the best mini-golf courses I’ve visited.