With a clear blue autumn sky overhead and mild fall temperatures, I took my first steps onto pale yellow cut corn stalks into my first corn maze. The path wound through the thick corn about as wide as my outstretched arms. On each side of me corn stalks rose to about ten feet, crickets and grasshoppers hopped across my path and a few dozen corn stalks to my right I could hear someone lost. 
As a kid, I’ve been lost in the hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace, but that maze is thousands of miles, thousands of dollars and 40 years away. The corn mazes I visited last weekend are found within an hour’s drive of Washington D.C. With their surrounding activities one feels like a kid again and the mazes are a unique setting for a wonderful day outdoors and miles of walking.
Every corn maze designs a different experience. The activities surrounding corn mazes keep kids busy with games and lots of education about the outdoors and farming. In most cases, well-stocked farm stands house wooden shelves with homemade preserves and jams, plus fudge, apple butter and pies beside baled straw. My corn maze quest began with an aerial picture of the “Virginia is for Lovers” corn maze that was created for Cows-N-Corn (540-439-4806) in Midland, Virginia.
Cows-N-Corn combines a corn maze with a working dairy farm just off of Rte. 28. Patty Larsen together with her husband and the dairy crew have been cutting this maze since 2001. The maze itself covers about 10 acres — plenty of space to get lost. More than 300 cows chew their cud and are milked at this dairy farm and another 1800 acres, planted with various crops and reserved for grazing, surround the silos and barns.
Besides wandering through the corn maze Cows-N-Corn provides hayride tours of the dairy farm with an explanation of how the cows are fed, exercised and milked. The guide explains how the milk is collected twice a day, cooled and stored for pickup and processing — this farm sends out its raw milk. The hayride passes pens where baby calves are kept individually for their first weeks to insure that infections don’t spread and others where the calves join their sisters and cousins getting initiated for a life of milking.
The dairy and farm hands also give presentations about the life of a dairy cow, how much milk they provide (about seven gallons a day), a demonstration of which parts of the animal provide different cuts of meat (of course these are dairy cattle, not the eatin’ kind), new conservation methods in farming and others. Besides being fun, the visit leaves everyone with something new learned. Heck, I had no idea of where a brisket was butchered.
On the Saturday I visited, Cows-N-Corn celebrated their annual dinner and barn dance. They served a buffet of roast beef with beans, potatoes, cole slaw and peaches. Dining ala picnic tables beneath spreading tents gave everyone a chance to meet some of the other visitors. Afterwards, as the moon rose over the fields, cloggers from nearby Manassas strutted their stuff and then a barn dance with plenty of square dancing followed.
The dance floor filled up quickly with everyone from grandpa and grandma to 6- and 7-year-olds and teenagers swinging with their friends and parents. It stayed that way through circle dances and a Virginia reel. It’s impossible to not have a good time while square dancing — the perfect activity to forget the outside world. A few swing-your-partners, sashays, dosidos and a few bows filled the barn with smiles on every dancer’s face.
Cows-N-Corn Maze Adventure and Dairy Farm is open until November 2nd. The final weekends host the annual haunted hayride. Anyone coming for the hayride can stay and work their way through the maze by flashlight and enjoy Friday and Saturday night campfires.
About a half-hour to the north another corn maze has been cut into the countryside called The Corn Maze in The Plains (540-456-7339), just to the north of Interstate 66. As mazes go, this one is tough, real tough. Before entering, participants can pick up a flag on a 10-foot pole to wave should they get lost and exasperated. A Corn Cop then will help the lost souls zigzag their way to the exit.
Maze walkers twist and turn, come to dead ends, make useless circles and eventually come across stations in different sections of the maze. There, they do a rubbing of a section of the maze map, answer a question about nature and continue on their way. Some of the maze walkers find all eight of the stations; others only find a few.
Kate Knott who runs the maze suggested that we throw away our adult inhibitions and try to approach the maze as children. She observed that kids make it through the maze about 15 minutes faster than adults, evidently, because adults are sidetracked by trying to keep themselves oriented by the sun or buildings and end up wasting time.
Outside of the maze, kids play on slides, roll each other in large plastic drainage tubes and take hayrides. Visitors check out piles of giant pumpkins looking for the perfect jack-o-lantern and jellies, jams, apple and pumpkin butter, salsa and other homemade goodies pack the barn. The piece de resistance — Pumpkin Pie Fudge. Kate cautioned that some former visitors drive hours every year just for the pumpkin pie fudge. After eating a piece as I turned onto the highway, I think I might be driving back to get some more for myself and gifts.
The Corn Maze at The Plains is open every weekend from September 20th through November 2nd.
Besides these mazes in Virginia the country has more than 600 other corn mazes in almost every state in the union. Go to the Corn Maze directory on the web to discover a nearby corn maze.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
