Flight of the Navigator

They say men have an "innate" ability for a sense of direction. I must tell you that I have witnessed this theory fail several times over, but for a second, let's just pretend it's true. This story is a bit of a backtrack to our trip to L.A.

After perhaps the longest conference day of all, Kev and I went back to Jay's house and chilled out for a while. It was about 8pm (11pm on our East coast body clocks) and we were discussing what to do. (By "we", I am referring to Kevin and Jason) I am feeling very tired at this point and pretty much eyeing every soft surface that one could use as a bed. Kevin mentions that he would like to go to a corn maze....tonight. I hem and haw and hem and haw some more but my passive aggressive responses are being ignored and it is off to the corn fields we go. Jason, Kevin, and me. The rest of the roomies declined....gee I wonder why. Don't get me wrong, I love a good corn maze, but tonight I was tired. I was tired, and grumpy, and wearing the worst possible corn mazing shoes ever...teeny tiny thong sandals.

The maze was only down the street (but as usual, this was L.A. so it took super long to get there) and apparently this was the ONLY corn maze in the entire city. From the street it looked pretty fancy. There were spotlights going into the sky, a petting zoo, a haunted house, and a bunch of places to get carnival food like funnel cakes and gyros. Since Jay came along, we thought we would be gracious and pay for his ticket in....I mean how much could a corn maze cost? In VA, they're like 5$, so I figured they would be 8 or 9 in LA. Looking at the sign upon arrival, it appears that admission is 10$, oh but wait, that was the price before 7:30pm. Our special evening corn maze was gonna cost us 12$ a piece, 15 if we wanted to go through the "Halloween corn maze". Thanks, but no thanks, I'll save my 6 extra bucks and spare myself from strangers touching me in the night. Whatever. So we are now officially off to the maze. Upon entering, we are given a small map from which we must navigate to different places and answer questions about voting. (this maze was carved in a political theme given the upcoming election)

Front of tiny map thingy showing an aerial view of the corn maze

Back of tiny map thingy

Being the brainiacs that we were, none of us thought to bring a flashlight of any kind. Lucky for us, we live in the age of cell phones, so we could use the light from those (except for me, who thought "I'm going to leave my cell phone in the car, because why would I need it in a corn maze?" So we are down to 2 phones and Kevin's is losing battery power rapidly. However, he said it wouldn't be long before we were out of the maze because he told us that he would read the map and navigate us to through the maze of politics. OK Kevin, you can direct us.

Kevin...navigating by the light of his phone

Are you sure that's the way?????

After a while Jason tries to help.



We each have own roles at this point. Kevin is the "navigator" (and I use that term loosely). I am the documenter, and Jason is the comic relief. Jay spent his time running around the maze hiding from us, pulling up corn and touching Kevin's head with it, as well as "making his own paths." So, I guess he really had 2 roles, comic relief and trailblazer.


Terror in the corn maze



We did have some success. We manged to find all of the sign posts except for one, which we spent WAY too much time looking for before we came to the conclusion that some teenagers stole it. I was impressed too, because these were large and heavy signs, but I guess you shouldn't underestimate the power of teenagers in a corn maze..at night...around Halloween..in LA. The attendant that we saw after we exited the maze didn't seem at all surprised that the sign vanished. All he said was "damn teenagers!"


Where's the sign? It should be here!!!!



This is a pic of the signs we were trying to find. You can't see Kevin's face, but he is smiling because he found this one. I guess he wasn't half-bad as a navigator, contrary to popular belief.