I saw only a portion of the homemade road sign as we sped past… Corn Maze. “Go back, go back!” I urged the driver. He good-naturedly turned the car around and we went back to read the rest of the sign. I’d never been to a corn maze, and I wanted to go.

So we went. We arrived about an hour before dark, and paid our entry fee. The cashier gave us a sheet of seven “clues” to help us find out way through. The clues were actually questions to be answered whenever you came to a numbered sign. If you answered “A”, you turned right, if you answer “B”, you turned left.

Some of the questions were kind of tricky. For instance, when was the apple first introduced into the United States? A) 1600s or B) 1800s ? Now I’m pretty good at history. And I was pretty sure the pilgrims might have brought some seeds over from England, but this technically wasn’t yet the United States… And I knew the man known as Johnny Appleseed spread apple seeds throughout the American west in the 1800s. So what’s a gal to do?

We eventually made it to the next number, and the next. Finally we were at number seven. What color was Darth Vader’s lightsaber? Red or Blue? Well, blue was jedi, and red was sith, but I was thinking that in later movies there was also green and white and a special purple one, and… which movie were we talking about, anyway? Did Darth Vader even HAVE a lightsaber in movie #1??

Obviously, I think too much.

It started getting dark. Very dark. We didn’t have a flashlight. There were no more numbered clues. We went right, we went left, we absolutely could NOT find our way out. It was a very small consolation that many others were as lost as we were.

So what the hell, we backtracked… from 7 to 6, to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… We finally got out of there and looked at the map solution on the cashier’s table. Apparently there was a lighted bridge somewhere inside the maze and you had to go over it and then loop back under it. “What bridge? I didn’t see no stinking bridge…”

We then bought some hot dogs and marshmallows and joined dozens of others sitting on hay bales around various campfires and enjoyed the starlit autumn evening. On my first corn maze adventure I definitely got my money’s worth. Maybe next time I’ll even find my way clear through!