September 10, 2026

We Drove to the Orchard and Came Back With Half an Orchard

Every fall, the same small lie gets told. Someone — usually the person who organized the whole thing — says, "We'll just grab a few apples. We don't need a lot." Then the family walks into the orchard, and two hours later they emerge looking like they are stocking up for a winter nobody actually ordered. The bushels multiply. The cider jug appears from nowhere. The bag of fresh doughnuts appears and does not survive the drive home. Nobody remembers agreeing to any of it.

That is the entire point of the trip, and it is also why the vehicle you take matters more than the orchard's pie recipe. The day is never about the apples. It is about whether you can get the apples home without playing a game of cargo Tetris in the parking lot while your cider doughnuts go cold.

The Drive Up, and Why It's Calmer Than You Expect

We pointed the car toward the Hudson Valley, into that stretch of upstate New York where the farms sit just far enough from the city that the roads finally open up. Apple season brings crowds, and the approach to any popular orchard in late September is a slow crawl of minivans, pickups and the occasional sedan with a trunk already stuffed with pumpkins. This is where the car quietly earns its keep, because a Kia EV9 in that line of traffic is not a chore to sit in. It's quiet. There is no engine idling away the fuel budget while you wait. The cabin stays still and calm, and the driver arrives at the orchard gate with exactly as much patience as they left with — which, on apple-picking weekend, is the real performance metric.

Warwick, New York, sits right in the middle of this territory, a small town that spends September smelling faintly of cider and woodsmoke. The orchards around it have been doing this for generations, and they do not change their ways for your schedule. You pick when the trees are ready, not when the calendar says so.

The Trunk Is the Whole Ballgame

Here is the part nobody tells you: the day lives or dies in the parking lot, at the moment of loading. Four people, four bushels, a gallon of cider, a bag of doughnuts, a stroller that somebody insisted on bringing, and the vague promise of a pumpkin you have not bought yet. In most cars this is the moment the mood turns. Somebody has to hold a bushel on their lap. Somebody else gets a seatbelt around a cider jug.

The EV9 ended that argument before it started. Fold the third row flat and the back becomes a deep, square load bay — 81.7 cubic feet of it when everything is down. Four bushels went in like they had been measured for the space, the stroller slid behind them, and nobody rode home holding a single apple. That is the quiet luxury of the whole trip, and it is worth more than any feature on a spec sheet. You buy apples to bring them home. The car's only job is to not make that the stressful part.

The Drive Home, With Everyone Asleep

The return leg is always the same: the sugar from the doughnuts wears off, the kids fall asleep, and the sun drops behind the hills. In a loud car, that last hour is a low-grade headache. In this one, it is almost silent. You notice the color on the hills more than you notice the road, which is exactly the right way to end a day like this.

By the time we pulled into the driveway, the doughnuts were gone, the cider was half gone, and the trunk still smelled faintly of apples. Four bushels. Zero lap-riding. That is the whole story, and it is the only apple-picking stat that actually matters.

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