"Left," says the boy.
"No, right is definitely the way," is her counter-argument.
I'm thinking that we already took a wrong turn to get to this point. We've already been in this maze for 30 minutes and I don't think we are any closer to getting out.
"I see victory bridge this way. Let's go." She wins the argument, but is wrong about seeing victory bridge. As we step around the corner of tall corn plants, I see the scorpion bridge. Not the way out. On the bright side, it does have another stamp for our collection.
So our adventure continued, searching for clues, prizes, and the way out.
Forty-five minutes earlier we had arrived at the Davis Mega Maze, adjacent to Davis Farmland in Sterling, Massachusetts. We were about an hour west of Boston under the bright sun of late summer.
The introductory video said that it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours or more to complete the maze. (Clearly, we were not going to break the record.) I brought along my six-year old and his female friend, thinking I would guide them through the maze. My directions were no better than their directions. We each ended up guiding to dead ends or backtracks to places we had already been.
2010 marks the 13th maze at Davis' Mega Maze. Adrian Fisher designed this year's maze and it's one of the most complex in the United States. As you can see from the picture above, the maze is modeled on the continents. The empty space of each continent has a game/contest to play. (Don't think the picture is a spoiler. They have temporary barriers in the maze, changing the solution regularly.)
In addition to the maze, Davis has several other contests inside the maze. One goal is to get to each of the ten bridges. We missed two. They also have GPS coordinates posted in the maze as geocaches. I found those particularly frustrating, telling us exactly where we are, but no help in how to find our way out.
After making our way to most of the continents and over most of the bridges, we found the victory gong and victory bridge. We rang our success and then climbed up and out over victory bridge. It took us 1.5 hours to find our way to the end.
We may have been lost, but we found fun along the way.
There are dozens (hundreds?) of cornfield mazes across the country. You can probably find a maze near you.
Leave a comment and let us know about your favorite cornfield maze and how your kids liked the experience.
