A Mazing Race

A Mazing Race

Sunday Mrs. C and I went to a corn maze with friends.  I am not an adventurist sort.

I was not given a choice. 

I was told we were going. 

The Giants played that night, so my afternoon was reluctantly free.

A local farm carves part of his corn field into a maze and opens it up to the public for a small sum of money.  What a deal, you pay to get impossibly lost in a maze of 8-foot-high corn.  I was told it was an opportunity to “Make a memory.”

I mentioned that I could shoot my foot with a nail gun and also make a memory, but my analogy was ignored. 

The maze thing was on.

The maze was in the shape of a turtle if it was seen from a helicopter. From the ground it was just a lot of corn. 

Now I can get lost on the Garden State Parkway, so a maze was not going to be my cup of tea.  I mentioned that they could make a maze for me in the shape of an arrow…  “Maze travel for dummies” and I still would not find my way out. 

On the other hand, finding her way from point A to point B is Mrs. C’s strength, she has her own internal GPS.  Our friends Tom and Maryann were also up to the challenge. I pretty much just followed, and maybe grumbled, along.

They did give us a map.  I hate maps. 

If you hit a dead end in the maze there was a clue to solving a puzzle which was included with the map hand out.  If you solved the puzzle you won a prize.  I was totally confused.  Was the object to get out of the maze without hitting a dead end, or was it to hit every dead end in order to gather clues and solve the puzzle? 

I was in favor of just finding a way out as fast as possible.

Because we were so good at following the map, and by “we” I mean Mrs. C, Tom and Maryann; we found our way near the exit in just a little over an hour and we only ran into 3 of the 20 dead end clues.  Mrs. C wanted to go back and find the other clues to solve the puzzle.  She really wanted to win a prize.

The puzzle required solving the question, “What are baby turtles called?”  Each clue gave you a letter and when you shuffled the letters around you would find the answer to the question. 

I did not want to go back into the maze to find the clues, so I pulled out my phone and asked Siri, “Siri, what do you call baby turtles?”

Before Siri could respond, “Here is what I found on that,” Maryann responded, “Hatchlings.”

“That fits!”

“Fits what?” Maryann, who did not know the puzzle question, wanted to know.

“The answer to the puzzle.”

We didn’t need the clues, Maryann knew the answer without them.

Problem solved, we did not have to go back into the maze.  We turned in our puzzle answer and won a prize. 

A pencil. “Woot Woot!”

We did make a memory, and it was a little less painful than a nail gun to the foot…a little.