Around fall I start to yearn for all things… well… not Florida. I want changes of seasons, changes of leaves, and the ability to wear my boots. However, since these are all things not found in this particular corner (also known as America’s Wang), I’ve been dragging the family to seasonal things trying my hardest to enjoy my favorite time of year. Back in the days of yore (pre-kids) we used to go to Halloween Horror nights because I looooooove haunted houses. Sadly, it is now a cost-prohibitive endeavor now that we would have to figure a baby sitter into the mix and I’m not sure I want to drop a couple hundred bucks on sweating my ass off with a bunch of drunken college kids (plus Universal never has good beer).

When our oldest daughter was 10 months old, we took her to the corn maze at Scott’s Maze Adventure, it was sunny and hot and crowded and after milling through the maze while breastfeeding for about 20 minutes, we realized that she was too young to really enjoy it and we were frying like bacon. Fast forward a couple of years and we decided to give it a try again because all the activities sounded like things our 2 year old and 1 year old would really enjoy. Playground and Jump Pillow, along with tons of mazes? Yes, sign us up…we are ready to get our kids good and exhausted with lots of outdoor farm adventures. We purchased the Groupon, roped Grandma into coming with us and off we went.

They say those that don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, which is why my husband now has my full blessing to have me committed if I ever make this mistake a third time. Now a lot of the issues we had with our visit were weather related but still I’m a little miffed to have dropped 20 bucks on what was essentially 45 minutes of sweating my ass off while plodding through puddles of what I hope to god was mud.

First off the good. There are tons of super cute photo ops to have near the entrance (where the only shade is) and the employees are all super super nice. Alas, these two factors didn’t help to make up for the fact that there is no freaking corn for the maze, it was hot, smokey, muddy, and a lot of things were closed.

We stood through a video that was filmed some years prior and showed people having to wave a flag to get help if they were lost. Apparently it was not a good year for corn and their site had said the week before that the maze wasn’t as tall as usual yet and was catching up. Ok duly noted, we are not a tall people in my family and the last time it was pretty damn tall so that you had to climb a bridge to see over it. This time it was so short that we could see a family navigating through it and most the areas weren’t tall enough to cover the STROLLER. It was pretty lol inducing to see people walking through it. Luckily, my toddler decided it was scary and since there was a boatload of mud everywhere (not their fault) we decided to check out some of the other activities because it felt like July instead of October and wading through muddy rows of corn that weren’t exactly maze like, wasn’t as appealing as you would think.

The playground was not a hit with my kiddos since the slides were hot and wet and as most the equipment was a little bit rusty I wasn’t about to push them into it because the word “tetanus” kept echoing through my head. We decided to try the awesome looking jump pillow…which was CLOSED. At this point it was getting REALLY hot and there was a LOT of smoke in the air from where they were burning brush and my family was starting to get a little dizzy and hot and cranky. This was about 30 min in. While I understand things like weather (heat and rain) aren’t in their power, it sort of sucks that we paid for our Groupon weeks ago when there was essentially no corn for the corn maze. Maybe by the end of October things will be better, but as of right now I definitely do NOT recommend shelling out for the experience.

We ended up buying the kids each a mini pumpkin and then headed to downtown Mt. Dora where we had an awesome meal at the Goblin Market.