The girls and I spent a very mild Friday night with a trip to J. Webb Farm in Newport to explore their corn maze....after dark!
On the way there, I teasingly told the girls about the 80's movie Children of the Corn and by the time that we pulled into the parking lot, Riley was having second thoughts about even going. I offered to let her stay in the locked car alone and told her that she probably would be safe from Malachai there, which made her immediately realize that maybe walking through the corn with flashlights and her sister and dad wasn't such a bad idea after all.
Besides two mazes, the farm offers hayrides, animals (more about the donkey later), pumpkins, bonfire, etc. --all for only $13.00 for the 3 of us! The hosts were very friendly, and explained their two different mazes and gave us checklists to the 10 pictures in the maze to help navigate through the maze (if you saw the a picture more than once, then you had been there before and likely just walked in a circle) and also to a series of farm-themed trivia questions. The answers are revealed at the end of the maze and your checklists can be submitted for their weekly prize drawing. Armed with our checklists and flashlights, we headed into the dark maze.
We have done corn mazes in the past, but they take on an entirely different feel when you are walking and complete darkness surrounds everything except for the little safety cone that your flashlight illuminates, and it isn't long before your mind starts imagining all of the beasties just lurking beyond the edge of the lights lying in wait for you. While we could hear other people in the maze and occasionally see the beams from their flashlights, and even an occasional scream, but we never ran into any anyone. I could tell that Riley was especially on edge as she refused to be in the rear and each time we ran into a dead end and turned around, she pushed her way past Kennedy and I in a frantic rush to be in the front again!
We wandered the maze for nearly an hour before we found our way out, but decided to reenter to see if we could find the rest of the trivia questions. We found 8 of the 10 before we found the exit again and decided that with their closing quickly approaching, that it was best for us not to head back out and look for more.
We chatted with the owners a little before leaving, discovered that we were not very good at farm trivia (we got A LOT wrong!), and bought some cornstalks to decorate the yard with. As we were saying goodbye, their donkey started braying and there in the dark, it sure had the sound of some screaming banshee. The look on Riley's face was sheer terror! Had that occurred while we were out in the maze, I am certain that she would have needed a change of clothes!
There is another farm nearby that has a maze with lots of other extras, and I am sure that we will probably visit that one too, but with the fun that we had, and friendly hosts, we will definitely be going back to face the challenge of their harder maze.
