It sure left its mark on us,but we left ours on it

Mount Olive is a strange little place.

Every town in North Carolina seems to be in the middle of nowhere. There are so many towns that have literally a stop light, a handy-mart and a few houses dotted sporadically around them.

Mount Olive is bigger than that, but still succumbs to the random and seemingly spontaneous placement of houses, grocery stores and fast food restaurants that seems to be the trademark of small town country living. The houses themselves are all different too. Back home I'm used to the monotonous streams of housing estates where houses all generally look roughly the same, with the same size garden, driveway, windows and set up inside. Here, there could be a fantastic five bedroom house, with a big white porch and rocking chairs sitting on it, a huge fireplace in every room and turrets on the roof. Next door there could be what looks like a porta-cabin.

Sitting in the driveway of the majority of these houses are trucks or jeep type vehicles. Or mustangs. My room mate however drives a Ford Fiesta, a relatively unknown car in America compared to Britain, and its always amusing sitting at a stop light when every car around is at least five feet taller than you, and needs half a tank of petrol to make it down the driveway.

Then there is the college. Honestly, I have no idea how a college manged to start here and develop into what is a pretty successful wee institution of learning. It's small, only about 1200 students, and the people that go there are all either locals or athletes. It has a good agricultural education department which is probably a big factor for most of the locals, being raised in a very rural area after all. And like I said, everyone else is an athlete, as I don't know how anyone could find the place without a coach trying to find them first!

But its where I ended up. Where I wake up each morning in my little motel room, practice every day and where I am starting to call my home for now.

It's a tiny town, that will probably stay tiny for a long time. The main inhabitants will probably grow old there, and most of their children after that, spending their time working on farms, or in the small local businesses, listening to country music in their big trucks and honestly, having a nice quiet little life to themselves. It's a nice way of life and one that I would probably come back to in my later days when I feel its time to just take a back seat.
But right now, the students of the college, coming from all over America and the rest of the world, are making it a more vibrant place, they're learning who they all are and they're not doing it quietly. They like to break the rules that have been set down for them to follow, because they see them as being there to broken. They are using this tiny town, in the middle of nowhere, to go somewhere bigger, better,more important, where they can make a bigger impact.
I've been here a year and a half and I've already ran round Manhatten three times, partied in New Jersey,tailgated in Tampa, drank a full bottle of Jack and threw it all back up again in Orlando, threw gang signs up on the Lincoln memorial, made amazing friends from Miami, New York, L.A, Australia, Germany, Korea, Orlando,Brazil, Ohio and loads more.
Everyone comes from the middle of nowhere when they are growing up, before they make somewhere their own. Mount Olive, that little town with the pickle factory, is the start of somewhere for me and my friends here, and for all those that come after. Go Trojans