Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

Wednesday, April 20th

Another nice day, no rain last night but still cold - woke up to about 35 degrees out. Even the dogs prance about and want to hurry back to the coach!

I spent the morning working on the computer trying to get caught up on my work for Friends of Freeland and loading Microsoft "Office 360" to start getting a workgroup environment in place for the board. With all the trouble I'm having with SugarSync, everything I do has been impacted. Oh well, it'll all come together soon.

By 9:30AM we were ready to head out so we packed up the dogs, leashes, towels for wet little feet grabbed the camera and left the park. With a stop in Oak Harbor for a Starbucks Mocha, we made good time arriving in the fields outside La Conner around 11AM.

Following the "Tulip Tour " signs we were able to drive past many fields of intense colors ending up at Tulip Town. This is a very large farm with many, many acres under cultivation. They do both wholesale and retail plus there is a large garden shop and gift store.

Walking past the gate and through the entry displays we almost went on a Tulip Wagon Tour through the fields but with the wind blowing out of the northwest, we decided we'd stay warmer by walking around instead. You can see from our photos, there is a wonderful variety of tulips being grown here. the colors range from pearly white to vivid yellows and reds, long rows of pink, purple and orange alongside flowers with mixed colors. Some flowers had little or no resemblance to tulips and displayed multi petal arrangements like peonies, roses or ranunculus. It was quite a treat to see so much variety.

By the time we came in from the fields and wandered through the gift shop it was 1:30PM so we headed for the car, took the kids for a short walk and drove into LaConner for lunch.

We went to a little place right on the slough called, "Waterfront Cafe" (http://www.laconnerwaterfrontcafe.com/).Since it was too chilly for us we sat inside and had Fish and Chips while we watched a half dozen Bald Eagles wheeling through the air over the water, swirling and swooping down to pluck fish from the Swinomish Slough. The food was very good.

Leaving LaConner we crossed over the bridge south of town and drove the back roads over to Deception Pass. Making our way around Similk Baywe passed through several small waterfront communities providing us with opportunities to see different parts of the area. Back on Hwy 20, we crossed the bridge and drove to Oak Harbor where we stopped at Walmart for a few items before returning to the coach and a late dinner.

The rest of the evening we spent relaxing and reading, working on the blog and uploading photos.

To see all our photos, click on:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mjdolanski

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