Teenage boys are weird. Not a groundbreaking revelation, I know, but I spent my Saturday with five teenage boys, so I’ve had recent first-hand experience. Thanks to a CAP donor, Camp AJ received a bunch of tickets to Kentucky’s largest corn maze, so Tim (my housemate and coworker at Camp AJ)  and I decided to take a group of teenagers from the county.

Unfortunately, the maze is in Versailles (pronounced VER-SALES, not VER-SIGH), which is about two hours away. Even more unfortunately, the directions we had weren’t exactly accurate, so it took more like three hours to get there. I was incredibly impressed with how well the guys took the long car ride. I think I would have been completely frustrated if I was a participant on the trip, but they spent the entire time telling jokes and giving Tim a hard time about getting lost (“This is the seventh time we’ve passed this Wal-Mart!”) One of them even made a comment about how driving around was a lot better than being at home. It was so nice to be around kids who appreciated having something to do – such a contrast to a lot of the kids at the other summer camp I worked at this summer who complained about EVERYTHING.

Not only that, these kids were really funny and very clever with their jokes. One kid seemed to have a one-liner for everything. Somehow we got on the topic of Lebron James and he had a Lebron joke that I’d never heard (impressive considering how popular those were a year ago). The same kid was able to make up words to popular songs on the spot, kind of like Wayne Brady in Whose Line Is It Anyway. The whole group would occasionally burst into song, sometimes singing along with the radio, sometimes not. They managed to keep both themselves and me entertained until we found the corn maze.

We had a good time once we actually got to the maze as well. One kid kept headbutting the corn, and several of them kept trying to get lost, but Tim managed to navigate us to all the checkpoints in the maze. The maze workers were all dressed in costume since it was Halloween weekend. One of them was dressed as Mel Gibson in Braveheart and had a really impressive Scottish accent. He managed to convince half the group that he was actually from Scotland before he switched over to an American accent. Then he said he was actually from Canada, and proceeded to talk with a Canadian accent. I’m still not sure whether to believe that he was from Canada or not.

It was definitely a successful trip, which I really needed because so many other events have been poorly attended. It’s hard to keep planning things when no one seems interested in coming, but that's all a part of my service here. I think we can count on this group being interested in other events, though – on the way home one asked if we would take them anywhere again. We told them yes – but that we needed a little time to recover first.

“It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha

Erin C. is a long-term volunteer in Educational and Recreational Programming. She lives in the Jackson Volunteer Community.