A-maize-ing

My sister Phyllis and her girls Kelsey and Sara visited this weekend. The delay of the AirLink project schedule threatened to force me to be out of town for their visit, but we managed to swing it so that I returned home just a few hours after they arrived Friday. When I pulled up, they were helping David survey the property with her GPS unit. They took benchmarks at a bunch of places, and Phyl has access to software that can map those points on a topo map for us. (We need topo information to complete our special use application to submit to the county - and we intend to wow them with our technological prowess. Yeah - that's our strategy - mezmerize the county commissioners by our property map so that all of the other pesky details will be approved a priori)

Since they were able to stay only a short time, we put riding at the top of our list. We got rides in both Friday and Saturday. I'm still feeling my way along the ropes of being a riding instructor, so it was good practice all around.

Kelsey, Phyllis, Sara, David

Saturday they got the extra special treat of waiting around for the vetrinarian with us and then watched while he treated Harley for a very swollen sheath. Poor guy! But he's been improving every day, so we hope this little episode will be gone in a matter of days.

Then we went to a corn maze. I'd never been before - turns out that they had, but the girls were excited to go again. We went to one that is close to our place, but it also seems to be a very sophisticated one. Though, seeing as how we've never been before we didn't really have a comparison. But with the size of the line that we had to stand in to gain entry, it rapidly became clear that this farm has embraced the commercial aspects of corn mazes whole heartedly.
Oh Hey! As I was typing this Phyllis sent me a link to an article about the growing "agri-tainment" business.

Anyways the maze was incredible. Every person gets a punch card with an arial photo of the field on it, and 18 punch spots. Then you get to wander about aimlessly until you manage to happen upon one of 18 posts that have a specially shaped paper punch. Each post, fortunately, has a map of where all of the other posts are, and thus then you have a hope of making it to the rest. It took us over 2 hours to find them all. But I think we were in the minority - we sure passed a lot of people who looked like they'd given up hope ever finding their way out and were about to resort to bush- (corn-) whacking.