A Beagle and A Baby: Mirror maze and roses

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Mirror maze and roses

Monday, March 27th was Spencer's last day of Spring Break. Elliott, by nature of going to M-W-F preschool, got one more day on Tuesday the 28th.

I wanted to do something fun and new for the last day of break. I also wanted to do something not akin in price to a day at Disneyland. A bit of internet searching led me to the Mirror Maze at OdySea Aquarium. The OdySea Aquarium , which is in Scottsdale, just opened last September. Let me have the internet tell you about it:

"The OdySea Aquarium is a marine aquarium, and the largest aquarium in the Southwest United States. It holds more than 2,000,000 US gallons of water and spans over 200,000 square feet."

There. Do you feel educated?

In addition to all of the aquarium exhibits (including sea otters, penguins, walking under the ocean (?) and a huge pool where you can swim with dolphins), there is a butterfly exhibit and the mirror maze. You can buy tickets to everything (which totals like $55 for an adult) or you can see the butterflies and the mirror maze alone.

We decided to do just the mirror maze. Here's the description:

OdySea Mirror Maze is a challenging adventure for the body and mind. By surrounding your pathways with mirrors you see infinite reflections, impossible corridors and mind-bending light effects. It's an experience like no other!

It was an unlimited ticket (we could have spent eight hours in there if we wanted) and came with one ticket each to go through a laser maze. It ended up being pretty expensive (maybe not Disneyland expensive, but definitely Knotts Berry Farm) for the three of us. And really, to be honest, not worth it. It was fun. But it was only one maze. I mean, how many times can you go through the same maze and still be entertained? I'll tell you. It tops out at about five.

We were instructed to wear plastic gloves in there because they don't want a bunch of fingerprints on the mirrors ruining the effects. We were also told to walk with one hand in front of us and to not run under any circumstances. A poor little girl in there with us one of the times did not follow those rules and I'm fairly certain she broke her nose when she ran full speed into a mirror. The crunch was horrifying as was the blood and the biohazard clean-up crew that came in to contain it. And by "biohazard clean-up crew" I mean a teenager wearing rubber kitchen gloves holding a spray bottle of bleach and some rags.

We did have a delightful time the first three or four times through. They also let us go in the exit and do it backwards. Strangely it was much easier to do it backwards.

We were in there completely alone in the morning. No other visitors joined us.

The spinning floor in the middle made for an extra challenge.

After we went through about eight times we left Scottsdale and drove to Phoenix to meet Michael for lunch. Then I bought some shoes and then we drove back to Scottsdale to do the mazes again. For what we paid we felt like we had to. There were lots of people there in the afternoon. They probably did the aquarium in the morning and moved on to the maze and the butterflies in the afternoon. We did the maze a few more times and then we were ready to come home.

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I took a new part time job providing supervision for a Speech Language Pathology Aid who does home health care speech therapy through DDD (Division of Developmental Disabilities). I'm working for the same company that I worked for when Spencer was a baby, I'm just not doing any direct services. I have to supervise one session a week, but my Aid lives in Southern Arizona, so we do all of our direct supervision over Skype. I was setting myself up in the chair in our bedroom to watch a session, when Ginger decided she wanted to help me eat my snack of almonds.

She really, really wanted to help.

I worked on Tuesday the 28th. I was walking by this rose bush which is right by the parking lot when a kid told me I matched it and I should stand by it all day.