Things To Do in Fremont

Picturesque prairie vistas welcome visitors to Elkhorn Valley Golf Club, which challenges golfers with a par-70 course designed by Duane Mines. Carts voyage past verdant fairways as golfers send balls soaring over grasping grass traps and pools of water with precise drives and well-practiced telekinesis. Players master their short-game skills upon the practice field's chipping and putting greens, and guests may equip themselves for the field with accessories, clubs, and apparel from the pro shop. After a long day of sending dimpled spheroids sailing toward the horizon, visitors share laughs over delicious meals at the clubhouse.

Give Advanced Air Incorporated an hour of your time, and their instructors can give you the power of flight. Their light training aircraft climbs high above Council Bluffs, where the airport's 656 acres start to look like the world's most realistic Lego set. The instructor hands over the controls, and novices take charge of a plane for the very fist time. The experience is known as a Discovery Flight, and it's a fitting name. That short time in the air can plant the seeds for a lifelong hobby, or perhaps even a career.

The journey to private or commercial licenses begins in ground school, but skills solidify once on Council Bluffs Airport's runways. CBA offers new pilots an ideal location. The airport lies close to Class C airspace, so new fliers begin communicating with air traffic controllers right away. Here, Advanced Air Incorporated's instructors have led many pupils to success; their website's home page brims with words of congratulations for new fliers or pilots who have gained instrument ratings and advanced certifications.

These students don't set their autopilot to fly off into the sunset. Advanced Air Incorporated keeps pilots around with a rental fleet of 10 light aircraft, including Cessna and Piper models. The maintenance team also works on privately owned planes.

Ultimate Baseball Academy’s bullpen of coaches and professional and college players enlightens their athletic students in all aspects of their sport across a 55,000-square-foot facility. Batting cages rattle with the metal-pinging or wood-cracking ricochets of fair and foul hits, with baseball cages capable of four speed settings spanning from 40 to 80 miles per hour for experienced players and radar-gun calibration. Twenty-four training tunnels, five pitching machines, and a 150’x150’ turf field set the stage for pedagogical sessions in techniques such as pitching, catching, hitting, and fielding, as well as training camps and clinics. The academy also organizes youth baseball and adult softball tournaments, pitting hopeful teams against each other in battles either to the top or to the top of the sportsmanship rankings.

Since 1925, the Dundee Theatre’s gold curtains have been parting for generations of rapt audiences. Originally a vaudeville theater, the venue was transformed into a movie house during the Great Depression as a cost-cutting measure. For the next half century it traded hands, sometimes screening art films, sometimes featuring family fare, and once showing a 118-week run of The Sound of Music, which was eventually halted by a town statute banning raindrops on roses.

In 1980, current owner Denny Moran stepped in and renovated the theater to recapture some of the splendor of its early days. The old vaudevillian stage and dressing rooms still lurk behind the silver screen, counterbalanced by a state-of-the-art Dolby Digital EX sound system and Cyrano de Bergerac smell system. Under Moran's watch, the Dundee Theatre now screens an eclectic mix of art and independent films, cinema classics, and cult favorites.

The seasoned outdoors enthusiasts at Oak Creek Sporting Club shepherd guests through enjoyable outings of clay shooting on scenic courses, well-equipped stands, and stunning heartland-prairie vistas. The meticulously groomed grounds and more than 20 automated shooting stations in the sporting-clay course replicate countless natural shots encountered in the field, from migrating geese gracefully landing in a pond, to ceramic dishes haphazardly frisbeed into the sunset. During a two-person two-hour outing, a guide with more than five years of shooting experience carts visitors through the beautiful upland fields and ponds of Oak Creek, helping patrons lock on to soaring targets at shooting stations at the course or stands. The 5-stand challenges shotgunning skills with new computerized Promatic target machines, which hurl disks in a variety of shots, including outgoing, incoming, springing teal, left crossing, right crossing, and teleporting.

Two-year-olds in HappyFeet soccer training sing “Roll, roll, roll your ball” to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The program’s graduates, though, often go on to more sophisticated activities—such as collegiate and professional soccer careers and jobs kicking computers that won’t work right. Founded by Andy Barney, the HappyFeet franchise encompasses two programs: one for tots aged 2–6 and Legends soccer for older youths. HappyFeet’s coaches focus on childhood development while hosting onsite classes at preschools. Their curriculum fuses soccer drills with kid-friendly characters such as Gus the Gorilla. Meanwhile, the Legends program takes a more grownup approach, emphasizing the arts of dribbling, scoring, and evading opposing players with deft footwork.