Mt. Olive, NC: April 27th, 2013 - The Pickle Festival

You've probably eaten Mt. Olive pickles before.  They're a pretty well-known brand.  It may surprise you to learn Mt. Olive is actually a place, and it's just a quick hour's drive or so from Greenville.  They hold a festival to their beloved pickle every year, and this year, my parents, dedicated food festival fanatics that they are, decided to come for a visit and roll it in with the pickle festival.

It was pretty standard, if not somewhat larger in scale than the watermelon festival.  They had an animal area:

Tractors:

Some sort of singer doing something:

Cars:

Lots of cars:

The obligatory giant shopping cart:

I'm honestly not sure why these tend to show up at every small town food festival I've been to, but it seems to be a well-loved staple of the event.  I guess it's like...where else are they gonna use it?

We witnessed a burger eating contest:

The guy that won had apparently been winning annually for years, and was Canadian.  So there.

Rickety, unsafe looking rides:

And I thought this house looked neat:

And then we left.  A fun day, if a little hot.  I left for Greenville, while my parents headed directly back to Charlotte.  On the way, I finally resolved with myself to leave my job.  I had been feeling the feeling for months, but I think I made the actual decision on the drive back that day.  Three days later, I told my boss I was resigning.  My two-week notice turned into a one-month notice for tangential reasons, but it was the beginning of the end.