September 4-10, 2003

mixpicks

Maize Quest

If you're looking for some cheap family fun, or if you like combining the great outdoors and being hopelessly lost, Heritage Station's Maize Quest might be for you. A huge maze cut from 200,000 stalks of corn in a giant field, Maize Quest allows visitors to try their luck on over 10,000 feet of pathways and find themselves in areas shaped like everything from the Great Pyramid to a big hippo. It's as if Highlights magazine bought a big field and hired the aliens who make crop circles to decorate it.

Some of us find the concept of being trapped in an endless labyrinth of corn terrifying, given the undeniable horror-movie fact that cornfield = slow and painful death. But apparently the folks at Heritage Station have any Jeepers Creepers-like creatures under control so that kids of all ages can enjoy using clues and a patented coding system, Maize-o-Vision, to find their way out. If you do want to scare yourself silly, try going on one of Heritage Station's Saturday evening Flashlight Nights, where you provide the tiny, inadequate source of light and the maze provides the heebie jeebies.

Maize Quest, Sept. 6-Nov. 2, Saturdays 9 a.m.-10 p.m. and Sundays 9 a.m.-6 p.m., $5-$7, Heritage Station, 480 Mullica Hill Road (Route 322), Richwood, N.J., 856-589-4474.

—Debra Auspitz

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