These are the perfect things to combine together as part of the annual Halloween sports competition, The Hallolympics. The Hayride Apple Pick is part of the “motorized” set of events (which also includes “Chainsaw Over-the-Head Waving” and “Trying to Get In and Start a Car That You Know Won’t Start”) and it really captures the spirit of the holiday.
The athletes are given a bucket and nothing else. They stand on a platform being pulled by a tractor and get driven though an apple orchard really fast. When I say the tractor goes really fast, I am talking TOP SPEED. And the old man driving the tractor itself is completely deaf and has terrible depth perception so sometimes people get clipped by branches. And some trees have bats in them. And by “bats” I mean both the flying creatures AND actual people armed with baseball bats. It’s a tough event.
The rules are simple: whoever gets the most apples in their basket wins. If an apple touches the ground it doesn’t count. If the athlete falls off the platform or if anything but their feet touch the platform they have to dump out their basket. If at the beginning there are more people than rows of trees in the orchard, they line everyone up 1/4 mile away from the tractor and and the first people who get themselves onto the platform and into one of the chairs when the music stops gets to be in the event. And it is ok to punch people and kick them in the candy corn.
Tell me you wouldn’t pay to see that.
Categories: 31 Halloween Activities
31 Halloween Activities #31: Summon Satan 
31 Halloween Activities #29/30: Go Trick or Treating Like You Mean It 
31 Halloween Activities #27/28: Carve a Pumpkin…In a Cemetery 
31 Halloween Activities #25/26: It’s the Little Things that Count 
The Year of Halloween 
I would definitely pay to see this. To SEE it, not to participate in it. I love/hate haunted hayrides as I am easily startled. I love/love regular old hayrides but the haunted ones I will do for the love of the hayride part and then I get overly scared by the startling things that happen.
One time I was on a hayride and the wagon rolled over the foot of one of the actors, so as we drove away other people in costume were running up to them, probably trying to call an ambulance. So it was like fiction meets real life or something. There were no cell phones in these days and we were out in the middle of nowhere so probably that poor alien with the crushed foot had a pretty terrible night. Sorry, alien.
Is this still on topic?
That’s the best pitch for a Japanese gameshow I’ve ever heard. I’ll Start the bidding at ¥100.
::dizzy with affluenza::
~The athletes are given a bucket and nothing else.~
So … the contestants are naked? Sounding more like a Japanese gameshow … or college activity. I would definitely pay to see this. I might even agree to being on the tractor to film it.
Adding a Halloween Accident story just like Cider … I was working in a haunted house one year where we had guys dressed as gargoyle’s jump off the 3rd floor of the house and fly down a guide cable to the boat dock down the hill. Now I didn’t see any of this as I was working in an enclosed box full of strobe lights … honestly I couldn’t see much of anything for a while. But one of the gargoyles was doing his circuit, got up the the roof, reached up to hook onto the wire as he jumped …. and missed getting his clip onto the wire. So one group of terrified customers got to see some gargoyles jump off the roof and fly down the hill .. and one of them fall and smack the ground near them with a sickening crack as he broke 3 ribs and his sternum. Then … he just gets back up .. runs back up to the roof and continues what he was doing …. now with 3 broken ribs. Refusing to go to the hospital he worked the rest of his gargoyle shift for the night. I couldn’t have done that, but that’s what everyone else said about my job working in a 10 by 10 foot cube painted in checkerboard with industrial strobe lights in the corners. I was also painted in matching checkerboard.