Every year my hometown of Warwick, NY holds Applefest on the first Sunday of October and this year was its twenty first anniversary. Applefest is a traditional community fair and festival to celebrate the fall harvest. Warwick’s main harvest crop is apples. Hence the name Applefest. This year rolled in the biggest crowd I can remember in five years. I have to admit, I thought that Applefest had jumped the shark and was doomed to be forgotten, but for whatever reason the crowd turn out was at least 30,000 people. One economist theory is that a bad economy makes for people doing less foreign/long distance vacation travel meaning they do more local spending in a 30 mile radius and it certainly seems feasible given what I saw at Applefest a week ago. This meant for one day the Town of Warwick, NY’s population (~35k people) was doubled and shoved into the tiny Village of Warwick. The Village is at the town’s center and where most of the festival takes place. Cars were lined up down Route 94 into New Jersey and over the mountain down Route 17 to NYC. Admittedly traffic going into Northern and Western Orange County was light so clearly the metro crowd was in full effect.
The unfortunate downside is the festival at that level of attendance in such a small village results in it being very hard to enjoy with two young children. It’s hard to move around with a stroller and my eight year old daughter doesn’t have the patience to wait in line twenty minutes for a ride or forty minutes for a bag of popcorn. So our trip through the festival was very brief in the form of two vital favorite family stops.
First we got gyros down on Church Street. Every year this great gyro stand setups and make the best lamb gyros ever. They are simply amazing. The price is forty dollars though (not exactly priceless). Pretty steep for three gyros. Then we went over to Stanley Deming Park on the other side of the Village so my older daughter could ride the carnival rides. Twenty five dollars later, three hours, and some six rides (yes I said only six rides in three hours– absolutely packed) everybody was cranky, hot, and tired. So we called it quits.
I like Applefest, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great way to support local community organizations, raise funds for volunteer emergency services and non-profits, draw crowds to the local agri-entertainment venues (orchards, farms, etc…), and expose people to the cheeky preppy Village shops that is Warwick (a God to honest amazing feat in a world filled with horrid big boxes and corporate owned chains). It is hard though to really enjoy it like in the lower volume years of the last part of the decade. I guess if sacrificing one day in Warwick for the masses to support the community is the sacrifice I have to make– then so be it, but I won’t lie that I miss being able to get through the carnival and get gyros in two hours.
