Mall of America - The Amazing Mirror Maze

On our trip to Chicago, we saw a mirror maze at Navy Pier. We thought about going, but it was not clear if it was open (we were there during the off season), and we may have had some other hesitations. No one was afraid we were going to get lost in there forever, but we have spent an awfully long time in some corn mazes and we didn't have unlimited time.

Anyway, there were reasons why passing by this was intriguing.

We did not do it right away. First we thought about it, then we asked questions. The attendant assured us that the average time was fifteen minutes. For people who were much worse at mazes he made a joke about throwing food in occasionally rather than being reassuring, but I think we were all at the point where we just felt we needed to try it.

One nice thing about the Amazing Mirror Maze is that they stamp your hand. If you want to come back a little later and try again (or just hang out in the maze) you can do so.

You can kind of see in this picture that they also give you plastic gloves. This means that when you inevitably reach out and instead of a passageway you find glass, you do not smudge it. Yes, that seems like it mainly makes their lives easier from a cleaning perspective, but smudges mirrors would lose a lot of the effect, and that's what you're there for.

Perhaps based on nothing but The Watcher In The Woods, I was expecting just white and glass. The Amazing Mirror Maze was much more colorful, with painted arches that were identical, and some light patterns that weren't.

It is amazing how effective it is. You would think that you will always see your reflection in the mirrors, and so the actual passageway should be obvious, but seeing all the possible directions before your reflection shows up can make just getting to the passageway confusing, and then, let's just say at least once it was a good thing I was wearing the gloves.

Still, we made it through, and I think in only ten minutes. We were happy with our time, and our ability to make it through the completely artificially constructed obstacle that we paid to do.  Therefore, we completely earned our stickers.

Yes we did.

http://www.mirrormazes.com/