Corn Maze Adventure
Author: Maibella Rhoiden
Last month in our Spooky Spectacular edition of the Tar Valon Times Nymala Sedai wrote about Corn Mazes and what a great autumn activity they can be. Just a few weeks later I went to a Corn Maze for the first time. I have to admit … I didn’t think it would be all that much fun but I actually had a great time!
Getting a good deal
Any time my family goes someplace it is a pretty big event simply because there are 9 of us (my parents, my sister and her husband, their three boys, and myself and my son). We always want to get the best deal and find discounts so we can afford to do fun things together. I highly recommend checking out websites like Groupon, Living Social, and Certifikid if you want to save money on outings like this. My sister found a great deal for us on Certifikid for a place called Maize Quest in New Park, Pennsylvania. The package cost $39 for a family of four and included: Family Four Pack Admission ($48 Value), Unlimited Trackless Train Rides ($28 Value), Cider and Donut Treat ($8 Value), and One 1/2 bushel of Pick-Your-Own Apples ($15 Value). We saved $60 for each set of 4 tickets by using this deal! And by paying in advance for things we could tell the littler boys what to expect – like the fact that they could ride the train a few times, and that they’d all be getting a donut – and know we wouldn’t have to put out additional money for those things when we got there.
The maze itself
This thing was HUGE! I did not expect it to be that big.
Maize Quest does a different theme each year. The map pictured above shows the theme of this year’s maze: Amazon Adventure. The red dots are checkpoints. If you do the maze “correctly” you should work your way through and pass each checkpoint. We … didn’t do that. We just wandered in, got lost, and eventually wandered back out again.
I was surprised at how quiet it was inside the maze – we couldn’t hear anyone else if they were more than one turn away from us. Even calling loudly for someone didn’t work; the sound was simply too muffled by the corn stalks. This was a bit nerve-wracking because the boys kept trying to run ahead and we momentarily lost them a few times before we got them to settle down and stay with us. My son, age 13, wanted to run off into the maze on his own. It was torture for him to stay back with the rest of the group at our slow pace. Eventually we did let him run off, and he caught up with us right as we made it to the end. The rest of us stayed together and let the littler boys – ages 9, 7, and 5 – lead us through the maze.
We saw lots of people working their way through the maze: family groups like ours wrangling their children, Boy Scouts traveling in packs with maps and compasses, groups of teens, couples holding hands. This is truly an activity than anyone can enjoy. The paths through the maze were wide enough and smooth enough to easily accommodate strollers or wheelchairs, although there were two places where the path went over a bridge that would not be accessible for anyone who cannot climb steep steps. I’m pretty sure there were alternate ways to go that would avoid the need to cross the bridges but I can’t be sure.
We livened up our brisk walk through the maze by picking up fallen ears of corn, plucking off the hard kernels, and raining them down on the rest of our group. The adults had just as much fun as the boys did with this (although we sometimes had to remind them not to pelt the kernels at each other). I think the funniest part was tossing kernels at the port-a-pot when one of our group was inside – it made a lot of noise and was pretty distracting for the person inside!
Other fun things
Maize Quest had a bunch of other activities to keep us occupied for several hours. My favorite of these was the bamboo maze. This maze was MUCH smaller than the corn maze and much easier to navigate. There were five checkpoints inside, each with a different color paint. At each checkpoint we dipped one finger of our choice on our right hands into the paint. Once we exited the maze we matched up the colors on our fingers to the chart (there were over 100 possible combinations!) to find out which phrase matched us. It was kind of like reading the fortune in a fortune cookie. It was a lot of silly fun!
There were also lots of small puzzle mazes that we could walk through on our own. Most took about 5 minutes to navigate. Plus there were other activities for the kids, like riding in cow-shaped carts pulled by a tractor, racing on pedal-powered go-karts, and riding the trackless train. There was also a "corn pit" - like a ball pit, but filled with hard kernels of corn. All of us except my dad climbed in the corn pit and buried parts of our bodies. It was so silly and so fun! Ad really, that seemed to be the theme of the day: silly fun.
We closed out our day by heading to the other side of the farm and picking apples. I’d never done that before either and I really REALLY enjoyed it. I’ve already elicited promises that we will do it again next year.
The verdict
Corn mazes are fun! I want to go back again next year, either to the same place or to a new place. I’d like to take my time and really work through the maze if it is as complicated as the one we did this year. It’s a great activity for a family, a group of friends, or you and your significant other. Highly recommended!
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