Micanopy Corn Maze

Just south of Gainesville, Florida, the Coon Hollo Farm  provides a great venue for families looking for some Halloween fun. The centerpiece of the attraction is the vast corn maze. The corn, towers of the tallest visitors, so there are no easy ways to spot an exit route. Anyone who has ever watched "Children of the Corn," probably should not visit the eerily isolated farm after dark. Guests who successfully locate the ten punch card stations hidden within the maze are entitled to a free bottle of water. The maze planner, sneakily decided to use one shape of punch hole twice, so don't think you are crazy if you cannot find 10 different punch types.

Outside the maze, hay rides enable visitors to interact with beef cows. A tractor drags the hay filled cart up a hill and past the farm house that bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman's childhood home, before stopping in a field so the cattle can eat the the passengers seating !

Parents and kids can go head to head on pedal carts while energetic youngsters let off some steam on the tough looking obstacle course. After enjoying the caloric burning activities on offer, guests can re-energize with some freshly boiled corn and popcorn.

Adults $8.50  

Seniors $7.50

Kids under 12 $6.50

Kids under 3 are Free

Military, Law Enforcement, FireFighters $5.50 

Fridays 4 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Saturday 12 p.m. - 9 p.m. 
Sundays 2 p.m. -7 p.m.

  

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Perdido Key Florida

When someone offers to pay you to visit one of the premier beach destinations in the U.S. during a busy holiday weekend, you know that something is wrong. The offer I received was from a travel website visitpensacola.com and the now infamous BP oil spill, coupled with economic decline was the reason they offered me and thousands of others $100 per night for staying in an Escambia county hotel or condo. The Gulf coast hotels do not generally offer the kind of deals that you can find on the Florida Atlantic coast but I quickly stumbled across a bargain. The Villagio condo complex was offering a deal for $75 a night with a buy one night, get one night free component that offset the $120 condo fee. In addition to that they realty firm who own it threw in a $50 gift card for a popular nearby restaurant. Driving five hours from Gainesville, Fla. would be fairly costly in gas but even taking that expense into account I would come out ahead. I am not the kind of person who looks a gift horse in the mouth, much less a travel related gift horse.

I set out on the Friday night of Labor Day weekend and after a tedious drive down I-10 I arrived at my Perdido Key condo. The resort was a curious site. A souvenir shop, coffee bar and sports bar sat alongside the road and behind them an empty parking lot lead to the two-story buildings that contained the condos. The ground floor units were empty and judging by the dust and cobwebs had been empty for a while. Large windows signified that they were originally intended as commercial units but presumably the recession had driven away prospective renters with the result that the dozen or so units were all empty. I was a little apprehensive about what kind of state the condos would be in but on opening the door I was pleasantly surprised to find a colorfully decorated, pleasantly furnished and rather large unit. The Villagio was across the street from the high rise buildings that litter the coastline on the Florida and Alabama border. There seemed to be very little activity in the area so a quiet night’s sleep was easy to achieve.

On Saturday morning I was keen to see if the famous white beach was still intact and made the short trip over the road to Johnson Beach state park. I was surprised to see makeshift tents, jeeps and a dozen or so BP contractors congregated just inside the state park. The beach itself looked as it always had and the sea neither looked nor smelt as I feared it might. Everything was as normal and the fact that the BP contractors did nothing but sit chatting on fold up chairs all day reinforced my opinion that the “disaster” had been overblown. All of a sudden a couple of things happened to change my opinion.  Firstly whilst collecting sea shells I came across dozens of acorn sized tar balls and the further I walked away from the main beach access point, the more prevalent they became. Secondly a dead fish washed up at my feet.  I do not know why the fish died but it wasn’t a good feeling to see it there in close proximity to the oil remnants. By this time my eyes were starting to burn and again it may have been just some kind of allergies but whatever the reason I decided it was time to leave the eerily quiet beach.

Pensacola and its environs have a lot to offer even if the once crowded beaches have suddenly become less attractive. I toured the Naval Aviation Museum which remarkably has no general admission fee although of course donations are welcome. The Museum contains aircraft ranging from pre-world war I craft that look flimsy at best, to impressive jets and even a space capsule used by Navy pilots who went into orbit in the early days of the space program. For a nominal fee guests can also ride one of two simulated flights and an IMAX theater gives visitors an up close view of the famous Blue Angel flight team in action.

On leaving the museum I drove further onto the Navy property to visit Fort Barrancas. The structure replaced an earlier Spanish fort that was destroyed before the civil war and the current fort claims to host the ghost of a confederate soldier. The fort has the feel of an old sanatorium with long white washed brick corridors but it is not an especially spooky place. Like the museum though it offers free access to guests and it was certainly worth a visit for the view of the bay if nothing else.

The last attraction on the navy base is the lighthouse. Like the fort, it claims to have ghostly inhabitants but it is the claustrophobic interior which contains a narrow spiral staircase that drives more fear into the heart than any number of restless spirits ever could. No flip-flops are allowed on the metal stairwell, to help prevent falls which could be serious due to the absence of any landings between the ground floor and the top. Visitors would be well advised to tour the lighthouse when no one is likely to be there since it gets extremely hairy when groups try to pass one another midway up. The view at the top was worth the tiresome 179 step odyssey though and from up there you could not see any tar balls and the empty beaches looked quite normal.

I drove by the coast on my way back to the condo and as before I saw a lot of cleanup workers but no movement from the men or their equipment. Incentives work fine to bring people in but Pensacola and Perdido are offering these $100 incentives until the end of September and I wonder if the money might have been better spent elsewhere. Considering it was Labor Day weekend I was amazed at the surprisingly low turnout and frankly despite coming out ahead financially it does make you doubt your decisions when you make them alone. However other cities would charge an arm and a leg for the Naval Museum alone so beach or no beach it was a trip worth making.