Saturday Day-Trip part 3...the REST of the Story!

Some things just keep going on & on & on. That Saturday day trip was just one of those days that seemed to NEVER end!

Bregon and I had decided before we left home that Friday night, that we would do a bit of research for our latest project/endeavor and hit a few haunted houses Saturday night after the fair if we were up to it.

Of COURSE we were feeling up to it! In spite of being soaked to the skin repeatedly, traipsing around the Texas State Fair for hours on end in the rain and hoards of football fans (I have a friend who, upon moving to the Dallas area, has taken to actually leaving town every time there is a football game like that,) and not being able to find any decent un-fried, non-artery clogging food, we still felt up to another adventure!

After all, what could top riding the scary SCARY rides for Bregon but the fear of the unknown? He had conquered his fear of clowns a few weeks before by going through Cassandra's Labyrinth at Thrillvania, and was ready to take on something new!

I even managed to find the right set of directions that should (yes I really mean SHOULD) get us to Drew Hunter's old stomping grounds.

I was even feeling adventurous (as I have a severe phobia of traffic after a wreck a few years back) and had left the map that showed exactly where it was at home...

Well, after about an hour in post-game traffic outside the fair-grounds, I managed to get to 30 and we were on our way.

I didn't realize at first, but the directions were leading me into my most unfavorite part of downtown Dallas...the part where it's easy to take the wrong exit (if you can call it that) and end up on the WRONG highway altogether.

My directions weren't all that specific, as luck would have it. I kept ending up on 30W and not the highway I was aiming for.

Finally, we just decided that since I could SEE the exit I was shooting for, but not actually GET to it, that we would just hop off and double back around in hopes of running across the right street...After all, it was a major street that we were looking for, and how bad can the design district be?

About 30 minutes later, and after ending up on the WRONG side of the very pretty bridge over a very pretty river thingy, we finally found the right street, the right END of that street, and ended up in a parking lot for a very closed diner affectionately called, "Mom's."

We were very excited to finally be there. This meant that I didn't have to call my friend, who happened be in the height of his job's rush hour at the time, and try and explain to him where I was and have him try and get us un-lost!

We managed to cross the very large road, and enter the Dallas Scare Grounds. I was very excited, because I wanted to see what the newest occupants of the maze were doing with it since Drew had sold it so many years ago.

The building is a very large trucking warehouse that has been split into three haunted attractions with a sort of carnival with a band playing out front. We grabbed our tickets and jumped into the line.

A zombie-guy on scaffolding was our line-entertainment. He did try desperatly to unsettle us, but alas to no avail. One can only rattle scaffolding so much before you get used to the noise!

The music, however, was very cute. A jazz version of "The Adam's Family" theme song was playing and Bregon and I had enthusiastically taken up the audience participation part!

We also met this little boy in line, who was with just his Daddy. The little boy was getting unsettled by the zombie-guy and was trying to chicken out, so we decided to try and make friends with him and convince him it was really okay inside.

I don't think he really was relieved by Bregon telling him that he was raised around these sort of things and that there were basically people like you and me inside, only in costume and make-up and who we had paid to actually try and frighten us.

We quickly got up to the front of the line, and before we knew it, it was our turn to go inside. We decided that it would be more fun to go in as a larger group, so we invited that little boy and his Dad to join us, which Bregon quickly regretted.

Apparently, the little boy found Bregon very comforting, and had decided to latch onto him as well as his Dad and had Bregon by the death grip no matter what happened.

This actually made Bregon uneasy as he is used to being able to control where he goes and what he does in these sort of situations. As soon as the first critter jumped out at us, that little boy was all about LEAVING the scene!

This of course was easier said than done as I was going slowly and checking out all of the pretties because I wanted to see how everything was designed and what everything really was inside!

Overall, the whole thing left me with a sad feeling. Almost everything was as Drew had left it (or so I gathered from following pictures of the attraction over the years.)

Apparently, these folks didn't know how to maintain what they had and much of the latex was hardening from neglect.

It was very pretty, and a lot of fun, however it was very familiar to me (from all of those years working Terror Show) and I kept automatically wanting to duck into every nook and cranny...but that wouldn't have been very nice to the little boy attached to Bregon, so I didn't!

We managed to clear the 3 inside haunts very quickly, even with me taking it slow. We went ahead and payed a little extra to go through the new addition outside.

The big attraction in there seemed to be the real semi that was positioned in the middle of it as part of the maze. Of course the horn still worked!

Unfortunately for us, that was pretty much the ONLY scare/jump that they got out of us all night. There was this one cute little skeleton critter in there, though.

I don't know how, or why (I don't remember egging this one on,) but he kept telling me I was pretty all throughout the house!

When we got to the parking lot, we were feeling very un-frightened and just had not had our fill of haunted houses yet.

We decided that instead of dinner, we would try and find the other haunt that had been our alternative choice for the evening.

We headed out, guessing on the correct way to go (I had only ran the directions from the music hall to the haunt, not from haunt to haunt) and somehow I managed to find 30W as the new directions had warranted.

Oddly enough, this was the SAME highway that we had kept ending up on before, when we had kept getting lost and missing that exit that we could see but not get to!

Stranger still, we found it with little or no trouble, and it only took about 15 minutes as opposed to the near 45 that the directions had promised! We even got a great parking spot!

As we made the trek down the street to the crosswalk, we marvelled at the line that wound all the way around the warehouse where The Cutting Edge was located. This long line did NOT include the queue line, either!

We made the executive decision to hit the port-a-potties first (who wants to go through a very big haunted house with a full bladder?) We didn't see the parking lot entertainment, yet.

Bregon got a HUGE jump when someone...actually SOMETHING came and banged on his port-a-potty door! At this point he pretty much knew to brace himself for when he opened the door to come out! He was polite, and thanked the creature for the help!

We managed to get our tickets and find our way to the end of the VERY long line. This time, we made some older friends by meeting four older ladies who were on a work-buddy night out. One of them was even from New Orleans!

We chatted our way through the line, talking about other haunts that we had all been to this past year. At some points, you could hear the goings-on inside the haunt from through the boarded up windows. We could hear lots of loud music and air guns going off!

Surprisingly enough, it only took us about 15 minutes to get through the entire queue line. Of course it seemed shorter because of the pleasant conversation and the line entertainment which consisted of the granny creatures roaming the lot with canes and wheel chairs, harassing the unsuspected!

This time, we decided to go through with the four ladies, thinking that they would be less likely to bolt like the little boy had done earlier! Boy was I wrong!

Almost right off, we hit a Vortex tunnel. It was set on super high and spun so fast that even I was dizzy from it (& I am used to them!)

It was meant to simulate time travel, because one of the first scenes we ran into, was a thick-misted room with water dripping from the ceiling and the plants that were hanging from it.

Somehow, I managed to miss the 14 foot T-Rex that was in that room-he came out and had himself some dinner out of some poor critter on the floor level.

As we were walking on a sort of bridge, we were at his midsection, basically (or so Bregon would tell me later!) After his dinner, that dinosaur spat water all over us- well he managed to miss me because I was first in line...but he got Bregon and our lady-friends dead on!

There was much loud music, and much drippage of water! Well, twice you could say it was a deluge of water! We were soaked about 5 minutes into the whole thing.

We did pretty well through all of the first set of scenes. There were several fire simulation rooms, a girl who could levitate, the time travel scenes, and then there was the chainsaw maze.

It was what appeared to be an entire room filled with mist. I could just barely make out the ceiling support structures that appeared to divide everything into corridors, when the noise started.

Chainsaws don't bother me, so I just stopped, trying to see what they had done that was pretty in the room. Chainsaws REALLY bothered the ladies attached to Bregon at the hip (conga-style) and they basically put the pedal to the metal and ran!

They ended up splitting Bregon and I up. I wasn't so sure what to do at this point as I knew this was going to be SUPER HUGE AND LONG haunted house. Lucky for us, this room fed out into a sort of holding tank of a queue line that served to keep the groups evenly separated!

I was able to find Bregon easily AND regroup with our new very frightened friends. They seemed to depend on me for some reason, to get them out of there- it's as if they thought I knew the way (which of course I didn't!)

We bravely forged on through laser lit rooms dazzled with green lit images that danced across the room and reflected in huge mirrors on the wall. We wound our way through the haunted home part, making our way through the kitchen, bedroom, even the coat closet where I noticed Freddy's sweater was hanging...

You'll never guess what the last rooms were in this part of the maze....MORE CHAINSAWS!!! This time Bregon was NOT letting go of me...but we lost the ladies AGAIN! We regrouped in the next queue line, not to worry!

Round three ended up being this never ending maze of a cemetery and circus theme which actually seemed to have (and I confirmed later to be true) multiple ways to go through it. It was super dark, and I was STILL trying to see the pretties, but we got through it all okay.

The next part fed into yet another queue line in what appeared to be the basement of the building. About 200 of us (or so it seemed) were stuffed into this tiny room full of 8 doors that lined one wall.

We were each given a glo-stick and told to pick a door once a buzzer sounded. We would have 5 minutes and 5 minutes only, to navigate our way through the totally darkened maze called, "The Pit" to look for the door that says, "This is it."

If after 5 minutes we have not found the way out through the correct door (the wrong doors all fed back into the maze,) the lights would come back up and we would be led out by the creatures.

Bregon and I decided to ditch our lady friends at this point due to the pitch black part and their tendency to freak out easily, and when the buzzer went off, we dove into the nearest door and tried our best to head to the BACK of the maze.

I'll admit, they do not make it easy. But, after having worked in this sort of venue since I was 16, I knew how to figure out which way it was we came from and which way we should head towards (the back would be the obvious place!)

There were several doors across the back of the maze, and the builders of that maze did their best to twist and turn everyone around. Every time someone would turn around and say that it was the wrong direction, Bregon and I would take their place, following the twisters deeper into the Pit.

We actually found the door labeled, "This is it!" I don't know if it was luck, or what, but we did. As a prize, we could get on the list to be called back in November for the grand rat-race which would give us a chance to win a trip for 2 to Cancun, but knowing we probably wouldn't make it back to Dallas, we opted out.

Later, I would find out that people who had been trying that maze for years had never found that door, and some even think that it doesn't exist. We have the honor of knowing better!

It had been over an hour since we had walked through their back-lit skull doorway. Yet, there was even more haunted house fun to come! The last part involved the bubbles.

It was basically a few rooms that were filled with bubbles from a bubble machine- not the kind you play with as a kid, but the kind you get when you fill the dishwasher too full and it overflows (you've probably seen it on t.v.)

Many people were taking the alternate exit at this point. Bregon refused to chicken out, and we took each other by the hand (tightly) and plunged into the red tinged bubbles. At least we had the foresight to cover our mouths and noses with our shirts, otherwise we would have been inhaling bubbles.

We could hear people bumping into each other and into walls. Someone accidentally plowed right through Bregon and I, separating us AGAIN. I kept talking to him, and he quickly found my hand again.

We emerged out of the room covered from head to toe with bubbles. I jumped up and down to get most of them off of me. Bregon just had to go back for more! He made angels in the bubbles...He made bubble snow-men...He basically frolicked in the bubbles!

As I took their exit survey, I heard the ladies behind the table giggling, saying nobody had ever done that before to their knowledge. I told them that why waste the opportunity? Ya just never know when you will get the chance to frolic in bubbles like that!

Our haunted house experience was over for the night, but we were still far from home!