The Maze adventure

 I've taken the kids to the corn maze for several years and never risked getting lost in the maze.  The farm has a kiddie maze that is pretty easy and self contained.  This year I decided after our adventures in NC that I could handle navigating in the maze since we had found our way through mountain trails that were not always clear.

We found a day we could all attend, that we weren't busy with band or hurricane clean up.  We put it on the calendar and kept it clear.  Of course G needs to have an academic crisis and didn't go in the maze or work on his assignment, oh bummer. 

After visiting a few of the usual fun activities, bounce pads, duck races, irrigation tube slide, mini tractors, and portapotties, we were ready to enter the maze.  I had planned that we would just keep turning right and get out of the maze like a roomba.  We took a picture of the map for good measure.   The correct trail was hard to distinguish from the places people had trampled a new path into the crop.  Sometimes it was obvious to see the dirt under the downed stems, versus the masses of trampled down stems.  But other times it was really not certain. 

Things were going OK until I reached the place of the first marker and there was no first marker.  It did not occur to me that the marker was missing.  We were lost.  We wandered around hoping to find the marker and I was hoping we would ever get out.  Eventually we found the 9 marker.  We got oriented on the map and were then able to navigate to the #10 marker.  P called out the turns as though there was never any fear of never getting out.  He navigated us to the 1-5 spots and out the first half of the maze.  

I thought of how like life this is.  Even with instructions it can be hard to know if you are on the right path.  You see choices others have made and for all you know, if you go that way, things will go OK.  You don't actually see their bodies lying around to show the consequence of their actions.  I do wonder if the organizers of the maze have to occasionally bring in a search team or if people just pick a direction and keep going until they punch out the side of the maze.

So we conquered the maze, or at least as much of it as I hope to have experienced.