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Ax Marks The Spot

Set the dial on your time machine for 2014, and along America’s highways you’d find ziplines sprouting like “Hey, let’s make something exciting AND interactive!” weeds. As with any tourism trend, most ziplines are ultimately unmemorable, while a few achieved Roadside America status for their sheer excess or their oddball themes.

Today, the hot attraction is competitive ax-throwing. We visited and reviewed an example of this new breed in New Jersey in May, and since then over a dozen more have thunked their way into cities from Atlanta to Chicago to San Francisco. Las Vegas now offers two ax-throwing attractions, built by competing franchises. Visitors can even throw an ax on Route 66, at the Uranus Fudge Factory, whose owner told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he saw an ax attraction in Philadelphia, copied it, and then borrowed the name from one in Las Vegas (Axe Hole).

Ax-throwing offers a more nuanced approach to ultimate justice than another recent attraction trend, machine gun ranges. The only people who usually get axes thrown into them — at least in the virtual world — are zombies or henchmen of the Chinese mob — so there’s virtue as well as entertainment in mastering the ax hurl. We’ll keep an eye on this trend, as we do all others, and note that while there can always be too much of a good thing, who knows, maybe someone will figure out how to offer ax throwing while riding ziplines.

And remember, ax-chopping attractions are something else entirely.

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