Celebrate Cheese Next Month at Annual Festival Just 20 Minutes from Rochester
Cheese is one of the greatest foods ever invented. I'm a little lactose intolerant so I shouldn't eat too much cheese (unless I take something) but cheese is just so good! To all of my fellow cheese lovers, there's an event that you need to check out next month just 20 minutes from Rochester, Minnesota.
The annual Pine Island Cheese Festival is coming up at the beginning of June. I'm really sad because I won't be able to make it, but I'll definitely try to check it out in the future! The official dates of the Cheese Festival this year are Friday, June 3rd through Sunday, June 5th.
This festival has actually been around since 1936. The original festival wasn't to have fun eating cheese, it was actually to help save the town in a way. According to the Pine Island Cheese Festival website, there were many dairy producers from Europe that happened to move to the Pine Island area. This made Pine Island a hot spot for delicious cheese. However, in 1986 business was really lagging. In an effort to get business back up again, they hosted their first Cheese Festival on September 29-30, 1936.
Needless to say, it worked! They took a break from the festival during World War II and that's when they changed the dates of the festival from September to the beginning of June.
Today, the Cheese Festival includes a parade, a variety of vendors to shop from, a golf tournament, there's a beer garden, a gala, a rubber duck race, and of course a cheese market. You can check out all of the events for this year on the Cheese Festival's website.
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