Connor D

Review of Quick Chek New Jersey Festival...

Cool event, but a little disappointing, and unethi...

Cool event, but a little disappointing, and unethical water practices.
Pros: The event is basically three things. 1. a fair, with an unusual amount of booths passing out free samples of their food/beverage. You could walk down the main isle and get plenty of snacks for free. There are also booths with occasional shows, like a magic show. 2. A music festival, with occasionally some pretty big names taking the (single) stage. 3. A balloon launch, which may or may not happen depending on the whether, but is planned for twice a day at both 6:30am and 6:30pm. There's lots of cool balloons, and their operators are themselves competing for $15,000 cash in a "follow the leader"-style contest. Finally, there also seems to be a few carnival rides now, but not much.
Cons: 1. Those freebies mysteriously disappear around eating time, and as it turns out, the booths were instructed to stop handing them out after 5pm. Make the rounds before then. If you go around this time, you may even be able to snag an entire box of samples, as they try to get rid of them in time. 2. You can't get anywhere near the festival stage without yet another paid ticket, as the area in front of it is fenced and gated. You can watch from afar though, if you grab a good spot amongst the outer crowd. Otherwise, you might as well just listen. That said, this year they let anyone in the gated area freely as the encore started, so you might catch that. 3. That balloon "mass ascension" should not be interpreted as "all at the same time", which is what you probably pictured. Actually, they're usually more than a minute apart, and never get too high or do anything particularly impressive in the air. They just kinda go up a bit, and then drift to one side and land. Disappointingly, they landed before the rest had even launched, so you don't *actually* see "100 balloons in the air" simultaneously. Oh, and again, none of this could happen at all, if they determine there's even the slightest bit too much wind. And don't make the mistake of thinking you'd be able to *ride* in this balloons, unless you already paid the extra $300 or so to go up in one.
More caveats: Parking is yet another separate fee, of course. (But there doesn't seem to really be any other way to get there.) If you leave after it ends, expect to be at a standstill for a long time when trying to leave the parking lot. They even block off lots of roads after you get out, so you won't be able to follow your GPS nav for a while after.
Health-critical: if you're human, or especially if you have a condition where you moreso need to stay hydrated, you will find that there is no way to do fulfill this basic human need without going beyond the original cost of admission. I believe this is unethical. You see, no outside food or drink is allowed, as is typical - but they even force you to dump out your water bottles to enter. Assuming this was just for safety, I asked where we can refill our water (not "purchase water") once we got in, and the bag checker said there was somewhere beyond the gate. So we dumped our bottles and entered: but after going to various levels of management, we were eventually told there was simply no such place to hydrate - not even a water fountain - and we could only purchase the small water bottles available in the QuickChek stores, $3 at a time. Not prepared for this, we couldn't even plan to temporarily leave the event to return to our car for water, since we had dumped it all out. In light of this, there's just no good reason to bring a reusable water bottle in with you at all. It's not like they'll let you fill it directly, even for money (though we did so anyway by dumping ice in it). A shameful anti-environment, anti-humanitarian practice. There is usually nowhere to throw things out anyway, because the trash cans are all spilling over.