Elizabeth Conquers the Maize Maze

First of all, apologies for the short hiatus in our blog posting.  Michel has not had time to finish his birthday post, so I finally decided to keep posting without it.  I know he has a ton of school work, but it's all about priorities. 

SO!  Here we are, three weeks into October, and fall has finally decided to come to Chicago.  Yesterday and today it has been rainy, dreary, and in the 50's, and our apartment has been wonderfully cozy with the radiators occasionally sputtering and clanking to life.  And that, my friends, is a terrifying thing, especially when you've never dealt with an old-fashioned radiator in your life and even more especially when they clamor and hiss to life at 5 in the morning.  It sounds like the infantry is trying to shoot up the apartment.

But I digress.

Before the coming of fall, Michel and I headed up to the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin to visit my cousin and guest blogger, Stephen.  Stephen lives in a gorgeous little community with gently rolling hills, trees displaying their riotous fall colors, charming farms and red barns, the most beautiful drive to work you've ever seen in your life, and corn.  Endless seas of corn.  And corn was, in fact, was my main purpose in being here.  (Although Stephen's house is a pretty great place to watch UT beat-the-hell-outta OU last weekend!)  You see, I had come to engage in that most Midwestern of fall activities: the corn maze.  Or Maize Maze, as we like to call it.  (Clever, right?  No one's ever thought to call it that before, I'm sure.)

Stephen chose a delightful little farm called Schuster's Farm in Deerfield, Wisconsin.  It's a farm full of good, wholesome, Midwestern family fun including a pumpkin patch, baked apple goods and homemade fudge, apple cider, a petting zoo, and, of course, a corn maze. 

 

Michel and Stephen were inexplicably low key at the prospect of traversing Schuster's Farm's epic corn maze.  I, on the other hand, was giddy with excitement.

The maze is in two phases: Phase 1 and Phase 2.  As we prepared to enter Phase 1, we overheard the ticket girl tell another maze goer that it would take about an hour to complete the maze.  Ha!  We were prepared to do it in much less time due to our top-notch directional skills and superior knowledge of corn.  And no, of course we didn't need a map!  We don't rely on such crutches.  (Actually, we didn't know there was a map until we were too far into the maze to go back, but that doesn't make for a very good story.)  So of we went, three gallant maze goers, determined to conquer the Maize Maze!

This is where we entered.

The corn was tall.

 Taller than Stephen.  And, unlike Michel, Stephen is very tall.

The corn was real!!!  Just in case you didn't know.  

We flew through Phase 1, keeping track of our progress by these cute little progress signs and pausing only to solve the terrible "Corn-nundrums" posted throughout the maze.  As if we needed additional entertainment during our trek!

After a few short minutes, we reached a platform.  I assume the platform is designed to grant some relief after being down in the maze for so long.  For us, it showed that our directional instincts had not yet failed us, and we were close to completing Phase 1!  Plus it offered some pretty gorgeous views of the surrounding...corn.

On the platform!  It is hard to take a selfie with all three of us, but we had to document the accomplishment.

Schuster's Farm

We decided to go that way.  And we were correct.

After only 15 minutes, success!  I had successfully led the men through the corn maze!  An hour, please.  Since Phase 1 only took 15 minutes, surely we'd be through Phase 2 in 20.

Boy, was I wrong.  It took forever.  We kept wandering in circles, retracing our steps.  How could we tell we were retracing steps,  you ask?  It's a corn field after all.  Oh, after a while, you know.  You just know.  Every time I chose a direction at a fork or led us down a corn hallway, fully expecting two creepy little girls with long, dark, stringy hair and white dresses to appear out of nowhere at the end of the row, we ended up in a dead end or lost.  We eventually made it to the second platform, but even that was not enough.  And yes, our egos so inflated by our earlier corn maze victory, we had again declined the option of a map, this time knowing full well of the existence of said maps.

There was a lot of corn.

At one point we found the edge of the maze...but it was not the exit.

Finally, after weeks of wandering, slowly being driven mad by the increasingly narrower paths that created the head of University of Wisconsin Coach Anderson and about to die of thirst and starvation, Stephen heroically identified the correct path and led us out of there.

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, I conquered the maize maze!  I survived!  I am the greatest corn maze solver that ever lived!  Well, ok, fine, Michel and Stephen conquered the corn maze, too.  Or, to be accurate, Stephen and Michel conquered the corn maze while I mostly followed, increasingly convinced that no one knew what they were doing and we were going to spend the night in the maze. And we were in Phase 2 for about 45 minutes, so, yeah, the maze only took about an hour.  But!  We still did it.  And so we adjourned to the store for apple crisp and hot cider.

My verdict?  Eh, I don't need to make going to a corn maze a fall tradition, but for a girl from Houston experiencing her first real autumn with the accompanying activities, it was pretty fun!