I thought: Wow! Their mazes have lots of bridges, and they even have bridges over bridges. What got me to drive all the way to Massachusetts is this picture from their web site: I have to apologize for giving this maze a bad review, because it has a lot of good features, and the manager, Larry Davis, is very serious about mazes. We then drove to Worcester, Massachusetts, to visit the Davis MegaMaze just north of that city. The next stop on our trip was Summit, New Jersey, where we spent a week visiting Anns family. I also like this maze for two things it does not have: It does not have a goofy theme (in the next review I get into goofy themes) and it is not built in a certain shape so it looks like some character or scene. These two features combine to make the maze a very enjoyable experience. This maze is a challenging puzzle, but it is also something else: it is a pleasant walk through a garden. Also, my friends all enjoyed the maze and found it to be very challenging. I spent about an hour finding my way to the goal. The layout for this maze remains unchanged (though they are thinking of adding a facility for making changes) so I knew the general outline of the solution. I was surprised that I enjoyed the maze even more this time than I had before. I had visited this maze before and wrote about it here. I felt bad about subjecting everyone to that mirror maze, so on our drive back to Staunton, I suggested that we stop at a maze that I know is good: the Garden Maze next to the Luray Caverns. There were one or more copies of each of us, and it was fun to figure out which was the real person and which was a copy. Susan, Kieran, Ann, and I all agreed that the maze was boring, but we enjoyed one thing: there were only four of us in the maze, but it looked like there was twenty. I guess the management was afraid that someone might get lost (and no one told them that mazes are supposed to get you lost). And even worse, some idiot has painted arrows on the floor to show the shortest route to the exit. Instead of a goal, there is a short path to an exit, which is covered with a blanket to keep the light out. You must turn, and that causes you to lose sight of the goal. I think the ideal mirror maze would have a goal you could see in the distance (that is, in the virtual distance), but when you go towards it, you bump into a clear glass. But if the actual space is very small, then the virtual space will be correspondingly small.Īnother problem with the Skyline Caverns maze is that it has one display, showing a dragon and her egg, but it has no goal. This virtual space is many times larger than the actual space of the maze. When you are in a mirror maze youre fooled into thinking you can see for long distances. Its main problem is it was way too small. There were various sea creatures swimming through parts of the maze.Īdrian recommended the maze at Skyline Caverns, and, because it was one of his, I thought it would be great. Adrian builds these mazes, and in March of 2007 he built a large mirror maze at the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham, England. Adrian Fisher has been telling me that mirror mazes have greatly improved since the 40s, with better mirrors and with interesting scenes behind some of the glass. One day we all drove up to Front Royal, Virginia, to visit a mirror maze that Skyline Caverns had constructed in a building outside their cave.Īs a kid in the 1940s, I used to enjoy the mirror mazes that were found in most amusement parks. Our first stop was Staunton, Virginia, to visit our friends Susan and Kieran. At the end of the article I try to put together my ideas about what makes a good maze. I thought it would be a good idea for me to review what we saw. Taken together, they gave a fairly clear view of the state of mazes today: what is good about them, what is bad, what designers are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and where mazes are generally headed. The mazes we saw ranged from good, to bad, to extremely bad. We planned to visit family, get away from the hurricanes (except there werent any that summer), and also visit a few mazes. In August of 2007, Ann and I drove north from our home in Florida.
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