Why New Jersey Sucks

This is the story of our Sunday, I could go on and on but I will try and keep this short.

We found an orchard and decided to go apple picking, which in the past has been really fun and a great way to get some GREAT apples really cheap!

We arrive at Johnson's Orchard at 1:00 PM. FREAKING PACKED, which is fine, and maybe a good sign. We take a stroll around, getting our bearings and see the long ass lines, which again could be a good sign that this place has great apples (they also have pumpkins, corn maze, petting zoo, etc), so not only apple pickers there.

After walking around we decide to go ahead and stand in the lines instead of just buying apples in their farm store and leaving. There is a ticket line and a hay ride line, you had to take the hay ride in order to get to the apple picking. So that is why we stood in the ticket line (to buy hay ride tickets). Ticket line = 40 minutes, then we hop into the hay ride line which = another 30 minutes. That is over an hour to even get to the thing that you ride to the orchard and it was $6 total at this point.

Once we get on the hay ride, it is about 5-10 minute ride to the orchard and we get off. We get out and start going up and down the rows of trees, and I guess they forgot to tell us there were barely any apples left on any of the trees! After perusing the trees for about 20 minutes we ended up with 8 apples and decided that we were done, we didn't come to hunt for apples we just wanted to pick some of them off the damn trees. We get back on the hayride and about 15 minutes later we are back at the main area. The 8 apples ended up costing us $15 and 2 hours of time. So when told this way it doesn't sound horrible but let me elaborate on the finer points.

1. the "orchard" was literally 50 feet away from where we stood in line for 30 minutes to get on the hay ride
2. we paid $6 to get on the hayride which in the most round about way took us to the place we could have walked to for free and in about 30 seconds.
3. did i mention the 40 minutes standing in line to buy tickets for the 30 minute wait for the ride to the place that was 50 feet away
4. you know they knew how many apples were left, why wouldn't you say something to your customers to let them know it might not be worth it to go through this whole damn process or just let people walk to the orchard!

In the end it would have been much smarter to just buy the apples in the farm store, yes they were the same price but it wouldn't have included the hay ride price and there were actually MORE apples in the store. This probably isn't a strictly New Jersey problem, but once again we had a crappy experience doing something in New Jersey, put it on the F'n list.