Popeye Picnic Festival

 Today Kraig and I took a scenic drive to the little town of Chester, IL. Chester is the home to the Popeye Music and an annual festival in celebration of Popeye.
This festival definitely gave me some new-found respect for the Niles Apple Festival as the Popeye Festival left some to be desired. We drove an hour there and back and only stayed at the festival for 45 minutes. The bright spot of the Festival was the weiner dog race. It was definitely a smaller scale version of the one we saw in Nevada, but it was still fun (and funny). Those dogs are great, and when we settle back in Michigan, we are so getting one. I am pretty sure we will train it for weiner dog races.

After the races, we walked around town, and I got to meet the guest of honor himself. We tried to find the craft show, but we couldn't find it. We had some ice cream and walked through the one room Popeye Museum. It was really just a lot of collectibles. Mostly, we people watched- in jeans and t-shirts, we seemed to be the best dressed ones there. We saw some mullets, and we think we saw a little boy dressed in little girl jeans- or was it a girl? We really do not know.
Anyway, there was also a carnival and a beer tent- but we skipped those. The line for the free caricatures was too long, but that would have been cool. I was hoping for this to be a super awesome festival, but sometimes expectations fall short. The locals seemed to like it and that's all that matters, I guess. I wonder what their high school's mascot is...