Almost every boy has dreamt of driving a bulldozer or operating a big crane or pressing the pedal to the metal of an earth mover the size of a house.
Alas, that dream never comes true for most boys, who grow up to work in stuffy offices, wearing stuffy suits and neckties, driving nothing bigger than a family car.
But an enterprising construction contractor in Germany has come up with a money-making scheme for putting his idle machinery to use on weekends -- by turning his bulldozer lot into a theme park where boys of all ages can come and make that childhood dream come true.
He calls it the Monster Park, and on any given Saturday the sprawling dirt lot in the Bavarian town of Rattelsdorf near Bamberg is teeming with men and boys happily clambering into truly monstrous equipment.
Under supervision, they turn the ignition key and throttle up to do some really big work. The park offers plenty of mounds of earth that just beg to be picked up by some gigantic shovel and dumped a few yards away.
Or just dumped back where they started. It doesn't matter that no actual work gets done. The whole point of the Monster Park is just to give guys a go at a some of the biggest behemoths on wheels.
"I can't believe I'm actually doing this," one beaming 30-something man told RTL Television as he shifted gears in the cab of a Caterpillar track dozer. "It's like being in one great big sandbox with the toy bulldozer I had as a kid, except this is the real thing."
Another father and his two small sons were under the canopy of an Allis Chalmers road grader, testing out the eight-speed powershift in preparation for some really serious work on an imaginary autobahn.
"This is a wonderful experience for my boys which they'll no doubt remember all their lives," he told the TV interviewer as he worked the gearshift while his two boys looked over his shoulder in unabashed envy.
Other, luckier boys had a piece of equipment all to themselves, like 14-year-old Dennis Weiner.
"It doesn't get cooler than this," Dennis said as he operated a mini track excavator, shifting man-sized mounds of dirt here and there to his heart's content.
In all, there are about 30 machines on offer at the 15,000m2 lot, a veritable big boys' sandbox. Anything and everything is just waiting to be put into use, on a sliding scale from US$50 an hour for a one-man digger to US$150 for a mammoth two-drum compactor.
Overseeing it all is Gerhard Seibold, the genial contractor who runs the place. He says he got the idea when the post-unification building boom in Germany began to lag in recent years.
"The building industry is in a slump and everybody's hurting," Seibold said.
"So I looked around my lot and saw all this equipment just standing there idle and thought to myself, gosh, a lot of guys would pay good money for the chance just to sit in one of these things."
"That's how the idea was born," he said.
So he opened his Monster Park to the public on Saturdays. With just word-of-mouth publicity, the park draws up to 50 men and boys each weekend, and national television exposure has resulted in long lines of guys waiting their turn to get in.
"People ask why I bother," Seibold said as he surveyed the machinery chugging aimlessly around the lot. "Just look at these guys. They're having the time of their lives. It's a boy's dream come true."
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS