Shrieking skulls will shock your soul, seal your doom tonight

There's a rather good corn maze, modestly titled ``Best Maze'', on the outskirts of town. We get there not as much as we figure we should, but October is usually when the semester starts feeling way too busy to spend an evening doing nothing but enjoying the maybe-too-cold weather. We got to it last year and were happy to, and we might have gone this year except that bunny_hugger noticed their sign on the Interstate warning that this was their last year. No might anymore; we had to go.

The problem, apparently, is that there's a pipeline project that's going to eat up half their parking space for a year and a half, wiping out at least two Halloween seasons, and that's just more than they want to recover from. The guy designing the mazes --- at least, a guy telling us he designed the mazes with unmistakable pride --- is going to make mazes in a new location, called Best Maze II and if we're reading this right closer to town? Maybe? Also the Best Maze people said there would be some big announcement made today, the day before their last day ever, but I don't know what it is as I write this.

We got there last Sunday, the last day we'd be able to make it. We got there closer to closing than we would have wanted, but they said we had an hour after the last admissions to get through the maze before we'd be chased out and they didn't think we'd need that much time, which certainly are not famous last words.

Our first thought was to not worry about taking this systematically. We both know how to walk through ordinary mazes without getting lost, so we decided to just take it as an experience and not try to be smart, just, experience being in pretty good darkness, with corn above our heads, strange noises rustling both near and far, and see what happens. Forty hours later and with us not having got to the first exit point we got a little unsolicited help from one of the staff (that we were heading back toward the entrance) and started walking with a bit more system.

In past years we've been distracted by the large number of people, often using their phones as flashlights, all around us. This time there were only a few packs of people, encountered rarely enough that we couldn't use their collective wisdom as a way to gain secret knowledge of the maze. Many of them were using their phones as flashlights, yes. A couple were scared when we appeared out of the darkness. A handful had seven-year-olds confidently explaining the way the maze had to work, a thing sure to delight me. (Sincerely. I remember being that young kid who was the only one who understood how things should work.)

Despite bursts of progress we were still getting lost a lot in the early part of the maze, the one with many more twisty paths all alike. At one point we found a nice, suspiciously straight corridor and one of the people on the lifeguard-like stands called to ask if we meant to exit early. Turns out this was one of the escape paths and we didn't see it because, as best I can work out, it wasn't signed as such from the angle we approached. The guide who got us back to where we should have been explained we should have seen the sign as we exited the raven, a part of the maze that's a drawing of a specific shape. But as best I can tell we never entered the raven. I don't know how we bypassed it entirely. (And, after some more wandering, we had to find the entrance of the raven so we could get through and proceed to the next zone.)

We really, really enjoyed this, despite the several times we seemed to be determined to leave the maze incomplete. We're sorry that this is the last year of the maze and sorry for the years when it was too cold or too rainy or we were too tired to go out. Also, based on what we got from their historic pictures and talking with the maze designer guy, it turns out the first year bunny_hugger went to the maze was the first year they were operating, before even they changed the name to 'Best Maze'. So while we may not have got to it all the times we could have, she did get to its first and its last year, and a fair number in-between. And, who knows what announcement was made today?

bunny_hugger, regretfully, did not start her GPS-enabled fitness watch at the start of the maze, so we don't have a partial sketch of the maze and our attempts to walk through it in her data record. We are genuinely sad about that.

Back in the county fair here's some pictures of non-rabbit animals and what we looked at after those.

Little trouble there moving some of the horses around. That one in back was wonderful as a succession of humans tried to move a horse who had no interest in being led anywhere. bunny_hugger was sharper on this and got a series.

And here's a cute little domestic longhaired cloud.

This is also what my hair looks like, now.

And back out of the animal barns already and to the carousel by night!

Carousel, drop tower, and Ferris wheel seen by night.

And here's a bit more of the midway. You can see it's not that deep into the night yet, but the bright lights of the carousel drown out the night sky.

Trivia: Though Providence (in the National League) beat New York (in the American Association) in the first two games of the best-of-three championship series of 1884, the third game was played anyway. Providence won again. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Alexandra Lange.