Every year in Pittston, PA (the town BJ works in) has a festival to celebrate tomatoes. The town has a high population of Italian-Americans and prides itself in that fact. BJ and I joke that it is a requirement that you be Italian to live in Pittston. Or at least faux-Italian! Pretty sure that they check your family tree to make sure!
So we have the Pittston Tomato Festival pretty much every year that I have lived year...with maybe the exception of one. It is usually a good time filled with lots of food and bumping into people we know...just like every other festival/bazaar in NEPA! But the one thing that this festival has that the others do not...the tomato fight!
We have never attended this part of the event. I guess we either had other stuff going on or did not really care to go. This year we went. I was encouraged by Katharyn that "we had to check this out" and since she and her husband and his boys were going...BJ and I tagged along. We started with the parade. We sat at the end of it so that we were close to Cooper's (the site of the fight) and only watched about a 1/3 of it. Then we made our way over to Cooper's and got a table in the cabana bar. We ordered some great food and waited for the fight to start. Once it started it was one of the craziest things I have seen! Mayhem and tomatoes flying everywhere. Neil's boys got to throw some tomatoes too and they were so thrilled to get to participate! Some pictures from the day!
us waiting for the fight to start
boxes of tomatoes waiting to thrown
participants in the designated area...waiting to start
notice the speedo guy!
the fight underway...CRAZY!!!!
the aftermath
the clean-up...front end loader and firehoses!
That, folks, was 5000 lbs of rotten tomatoes...don't anybody eat the marinara sauce today in Pittston!
