Two college buds spent 19 hours riding 10 NJ Transit buses across NJ. Here's how it went

Armed with Cheez-Its, pretzels and a whiteboard to track their journey and fares, Jeremy Zorek and Miles Taylor attempted what few — perhaps no one, at least not voluntarily — have done before.

They traversed the length of New Jersey from its southernmost point up to the New York state line using only local NJ Transit bus service. The two urban planning majors embarked on a 19-hour, 43-minute and 17-second excursion from Cape May to Warwick, New York, using 10 bus routes that largely avoided major highways and cost them together less than $100.

“It was actually surprisingly perfectly smooth,” Zorek said. “We had no missed transfers. Everything went according to schedule.”

Spoiler alert: You can actually get to Warwick from Cape May using just three express NJ Transit buses — or via car in less than four hours — but as Taylor said, their way was “more fun.”

“That’s something I love doing, taking these very local services and chaining them together for these ungodly menaces of trips that no one would actually do, but it’s kind of cool that you can," Taylor said.

Plus, Zorek said, they were able to see the entire Garden State.

“Quite literally, we went from marshes to mountains," Zorek said.

Transit fans since Thomas the Tank Engine

Taylor and Zorek both described themselves as kids who never grew out of the Thomas the Tank Engine, train-loving phase from childhood. They love all things transportation — buses, trains and any other form of transit — and are both studying urban planning, with Zorek at Rutgers University and Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Their transportation friendship began after they came across each other’s social media accounts dedicated to transit, and then they randomly — and fittingly — ran into each other at the 30^th Street train station in Philadelphia.

Now, they ride trains and buses together, exploring all that New Jersey’s public transportation ecosystem has to offer. In May, they traveled the state end-to-end via NJ Transit trains, going from Port Jervis in New York to Atlantic City, a breezy 7½-hour journey compared with the almost full day of hopping buses in October.

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The latter bus adventure began on a Friday in October with catching the No. 313 bus in Cape May at 10:02 p.m.

The trip was chronicled via video by Taylor and with a 32-tweet thread on Zorek’s Twitter account. It began with a picture of the two undergraduates smiling in the dark behind an NJ Transit charter bus, with Taylor paying homage to both public transportation and his native Massachusetts by wearing a Boston “T” subway sweatshirt.

'A love letter to New Jersey'

The first transfer in Vineland was the only potential hiccup the guys said they encountered.

The 553 bus was supposed to arrive at 12:48 a.m., but it wasn’t showing up on the NJ Transit app.

“We’re standing there and we were thinking, the only other bus out of Vineland is that bus to Atlantic City … everything else has stopped for the night,” Taylor said, as they contemplated whether to end the trip. Pretty soon, though, it showed up a few minutes late.

"That was the real tension part of the trip," Taylor said.

The next transfer was in Pleasantville, where they arrived at 1:55 a.m. Their next bus wasn’t due for another hour, and luckily Johnny D’s pizzeria was a two-minute walk away and open until 3 a.m. — that was a “real morale booster,” Taylor said.

“We started to call the trip ‘A love letter to New Jersey,’” Taylor said. In addition to late-night pizza dining, they started counting other Jersey hallmarks — Wawas, diners and jug handles — to pass the time.

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The worst layover was in Old Bridge, where they had to wait from 6 to 9 a.m. for the next bus. One of the only businesses nearby was a ShopRite, which didn’t open until 7 a.m. They also killed an hour walking to a farther bus stop on the route to warm up.

“That was sort of a low point in terms of where we were waiting, because at that point we were very tired and we knew there was so much left to go, and cold and stuck on the side of Route 9, which is not very pleasant,” Zorek said.

But it went up from there. They were able to get French toast and home fries at a diner in Tanner’s Corner between buses; they fueled up again at Willowbrook Mall on another hiatus.

At each stop, the straphangers documented the bus expedition with a whiteboard, complete with columns to track the route number, zone, fare amount, transfer fee and override costs for each bus they took.

“NJ Transit’s fare system is sort of infamous for being kind of hard to understand,” Zorek said.

Let’s pause here.

Zorek and Taylor essentially required a five-column spreadsheet to track what they were charged to take buses on the same transit system. And while some tickets could be paid for using the NJ Transit app, some transfers and overrides had to be paid in cash.

The complicated system is even too much hassle for the drivers sometimes. Taylor said one bus driver — who coincidentally drove the duo on two different bus routes back-to-back and recognized them when they boarded the bus — gave them a pass on a $1.55 override charge.

“It was a little bit of madness thrown in there, but we loved it,” Zorek said.

All told, the trip north cost them each $48.25.

They pulled into Warwick around 5:40 p.m., but there wasn’t much time to celebrate. Zorek said he used the bathroom at a nearby Burger King and quickly had to turn around to catch a bus home to New York.

“At that point, we had been awake for something like 30 hours, so we literally got on the bus back to Port Authority and immediately fell asleep, and only woke up when we got back to New York,” Zorek said.

To watch their odyssey, check out Taylor's video on his YouTube channel.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Why two college buds spent 19 hours on 10 different NJ Transit buses