Today was the day... a big day... a day I've been anticipating for a good two years: PICKLE FEST 2012!
I couldn't go to last year's
Pickle Fest as I was in France last November, but I went my freshman and sophomore years at Bard, and it was a blast! This year's festival did not disappoint! It was just as I remembered it: a kind of awkward event in a series of tents set up behind the community center of Rosendale, NY, a rural hamlet about 30 minutes south of Bard on the other side of the Hudson River. Oddly, the inside of the community center and two of the three tents were occupied by vendors selling largely un-pickle related merchandise, as in past years, but it's really the pickle tent that counts! The biggest of the tents, it is lined with various pickle-sellers from across the Northeast, offering lots of free samples on little toothpicks and hawking everything from traditional cucumber pickles (dill, sweet, sour, new) to other pickled products (pickled beets, dilly beans) to the slightly unusual (pickled garlic, pickled fruits) to the truly bizarre (pickled meat, chocolate-covered pickles). After all the samples I tried today, I feel I'm becoming something of a pickle expert! Anyway, we all had a great time, even with the bittersweet knowledge that we will probably not be in the area for next year's Pickle Fest.
 |
| Chocolate covered pickles! (On a stick!) |
 |
| It was a sweet pickle inside. |
 |
Pickles on a stick!
(Because you couldn't get sticks and do this at home...) |
 |
| LIVE MUSIC at Pickle Fest! |
 |
| Because it wouldn't be a pickle fest without funnel cake... |
 |
The pickle's lackey isn't the best photographer...
But we still got a photo with the giant pickle!!! |
 |
| I'm not sure where to begin with this... |
 |
The back of my sweatshirt...
the grammar is pretty atrocious, but they're pickle people, not writers... |
 |
| The front of my sweatshirt! |
