Corn Maze - Davis' Mega Maze

On Sunday, I found myself in a corn maze for the first time and learned that corn mazes are excellent activities to do once in a lifetime.

We drove about an hour northwest of Boston to Sterling, MA and Davis' Mega Maze, the largest corn maze in Massachusetts. I didn't realize there were others, but not only does it appear that there are, I think corn mazing is a bit of an underground subculture. I bumped into a group of people, three of whom wore t-shirts featuring corn mazes from around the US.

The premise of a corn maze is simple - get from the entrance to the exit.

But when entering, we received a pamphlet that included missions, such as crossing all 11 bridges, finding the 6 portions of the actual maze map and create pencil rubbings of each, and completing some type of Mad Libs paragraph that required finding 12 placards throughout the maze.

While playing along with all of this sounded entertaining at the beginning, it quickly took back stage to actually getting out of the maze.

Corn stalks are corn stalks. I'd say that the fun factor dropped from 10 to 1 at a rate of one point per two minutes. After 20 minutes, we were ready to escape.

But we couldn't.

Throughout the maze, employees stationed themselves on the bridges, and were trained to give ambiguous answers to people who wanted to make progress.

("How do we get to the exit?" "You go through the maze." um, duh.)

Finally, we found a couple who saw the looks on our adult faces and lack of children in tow, and sympathized with us. A few turns later, we found the exit.

The highlight of the experience was, hands down, the corn bread. One would think that at a corn maze, there might be many corn-themed delicacies, but they offered just two - popcorn (not from their farm) and corn bread.

This wasn't a little wedge of corn bread, but rather a giant sheet of corny goodness.

I learned that when mixing the sweet cornbread with a few salty pieces of popped corn, the result became a delicious combo.

On the drive home, I realized that corn is also known as "maize," meaning that we had just experienced a Maize Maze.

Yes, that was corny.

Um...