He Who Walks Behind the Rows

Everyone knows that G likes mazes, and last week, I heard of a gigantic one in the area that we could go to. I'm also a big fan of mazes, and have always wanted to go to a really big hedge maze.

So we said farewell to the girls and piled into the Matrix to drive all the way down to Plainfield, Illinois. All I knew about the maze beforehand was that it looked enormous from the aerial shot. Oh, and that the maze was in the shape of a jousting tournament.

Within the maze are many stations at which you can either do a rubbing, or get a hole punch to show where you'd been. There are eight punches on the map in the central maze, and six hidden hole punches in the outer "race" maze. There are also five hidden stations to take image rubs with crayons that you get at the entrance to the maze.

Gamble did great. It took us over two hours to navigate to all the punches that were on the map of the inner maze, and to navigate all the long dead ends in the race maze to find all six hidden punches. We even found two of the rubbings in the central maze.

What's most amazing is that he did all of this without needing to be carried, and he was brave enough to run ahead down short dead ends to search out the punches. We didn't have any meltdowns about needing pottie-time, or more food (we bought two delicious locally grown apples for the maze, along with bottled water).

In the end, Gamble was allowed to ring the farm bell, because we found all the punches. I don't think many people do that, since I didn't hear the bell ringing very often. I'm so proud of this big boy.

Of course, I have to mention that it was at least a little creepy walking within all the rows of corn. I mean, Shannon and I watched Children of the Corn often enough when we were young to warrant a healthy fear of cornfields, Isaac, Malachai, and the blue man (yes, the blue man). Maybe someday we'll get Isaac and Lukie out to play corn-people and Gamble and Random can pretend to be Burton and Vicky, and they can run around behind the rows. "Outlander! We have your woman!"

Eep. Anyway, check out how scared he gets when the bell rings. Just had to try out the new video feature of blogspot...