The first half of October

Wow, time flies.  Can you believe October is half way over?  We apologize for keeping everyone in suspense for the past few weeks, but we have been extremely busy!  The first weekend in October we went to Shelburne Falls for a relaxing afternoon before Caroline started her new job.  The following weekend we went to a corn maze.  And this weekend we have two cyclocross races (to be discussed in a later post).

Shelburne Fall is located on the scenic and historic Mohawk Trail in the Berkshire foothills.  The major attractions we visited were various local artists' shops, the Bridge of Flowers, and glacial potholes.  Originally a trolley bridge in 1908, the Bridge of Flowers came to be in 1929.  Today, it has over 500 varieties of flowers, vines and shrubs.  We thought we might have missed peak color times for the bridge, but realized we were mistaken when we saw how many beautiful flowers were still in bloom in early October.

Bridge of Flowers  Shelburne Falls, MA

View walking along the bridge.

Coiling tree trunk.

The glacial potholes were another beautiful site.  They were ground out of granite during high water when the last glaciers melted.  These waters flooded the Connecticut River Valley, creating a huge lake which fed extra water to the Deerfield River.  These rushing waters contained several stones, sand, and mud which eroded the hard rock beneath it.  Potholes formed when stones trapped in cracks in the riverbed were twirled and vibrated in the fast-moving current, drilling their way into the river bottom.  This process continues to happen today.  The potholes range from 6 inches to 39 feet in diameter (the world's largest pothole).

Various views of the glacial potholes.

Last weekend we donned our flannel shirts and made our way through our first ever corn maze!  It was tons of fun and a much more involved experience than we expected.  Mike's Maze at Warner Farm opens every September-October with a new theme.  Past themes have included the Mona Lisa, John Kerry and George Bush, Julia Child, and Charles Darwin.  This year's theme was art-inspired with Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup (see the aerial view below).

2010 Mike's Maze at Warner Farm: Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup.

As you can see, it was a pretty detailed and their was a lot of ground to cover.  As we made our way through the maze we had to answer several multiple choice art-inspired questions as well as stop at "printing presses" to get stamps of different artworks.  We even got to stop at Spudzooka, a potato gun, and take a few turns at shooting.  After two and a half hours of wandering through the maze, we finished our trip to Mike's Maze with hot cider, corn dogs, and corn chowder.

The maze looks much different at ground level...

View of corn maze and Mt. Sugarloaf in the background.

Corn.

Making our way through the maze!

 Sorry again for the delay between posts- we will be much faster from now on!  Expect our next post within the next few days, including details of this weekend's bike race events!