On Saturday, Hubby and I took a drive from our home in Everett, over to the East Side of Lake Washington, and up to the town of Snoqualmie, via Fall City. In July, the Snoqualmie River there is about three feet deep and pretty slow-moving. The kids put their inner-tubes in the water upstream, and just leisurely float downstream. It was a cool, gray day, but they were making the most of it.
It’s pretty hard to believe that, just a short distance upstream, you find this:
In a normal year, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival takes place during the entire month of April. Washington State’s Skagit Valley is the world’s second largest producer of tulips and bulbs, outside of The Netherlands. There are a couple of large growers who open their fields for the festival; they charge for parking across the street, and tourists are allowed to walk between the rows of flowers, taking pictures and just admiring the beautiful colors of the flowers. They also sell bulbs, cut flowers, and other festival merchandise (there is a new t-shirt design by a local artist each year, and they get to be collectors’ items).
This year of 2020, the Festival was cancelled, due to the State Shelter-in-Place Order to stop the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus. And to make doubly sure that no one got in their cars and drove up anyway, the farmers (probably directed by Festival officials) turned off the “Tulip Cams” that show how the fields are doing, so people can see the flowers at their best full bloom. Double-whammy for all those who look forward to a trip to see the flowers.
Hubby and I go most years, and I try to get new photos each year. So here are many of the photos I have taken in previous years. I hope you enjoy them.
2015
2017
Tulip Fields near Mount Vernon, WA
The farmers in the Skagit also grow daffodils, and they bloom before the tulips.
Skagit Daffodils
2019 was an exceptional year for the tulips.
It’s a crying shame that the state government dictated that the tulip-growers of the Skagit Valley were unable to sell their crop this year. So unnecessary, and so depressing for those of us who need those brightly-colored flowers to show us that Spring has arrived. We fervently hope that the growers will be back next year.
For all you Ricochet members who are planning to go to the SD Meetup in September, I thought I’d do a little post with some of the photos I took when we visited on our way to Hillsdale Hostel in 2010. We didn’t visit all the places Randy has found, but we did catch a few. One place we visited then, that nobody knows about or wants to visit this year, is the Music Museum at the University of South Dakota in the town of Vermilion. Get out your map, and try to find Vermilion. You haven’t seen “off the beaten path” until you have been there.
Anyway, here are pictures of some of the places on Randy’s list.
Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming
That’s Devil’s Tower National Monument. We spent half a day there, and walked the entire trail around the base.
Obviously, Mount Rushmore. And for you geology buffs, on the back side of Rushmore:
I was fascinated by the layers of this rock, and their out-of-kilter appearance. The power of Nature.
This is only a small taste of the aircraft found at the Air and Space Museum.
Spring. The first sign is the gradually, gradually, lengthening days. Still awaking in the dark, but driving home from work in daylight. Here in the Pacific Northwest, Spring is normally pretty rainy (yeah, the cliche about April showers bringing May flowers that we all know and love). But we actually love the rain here, because that means Mother Nature waters our yards instead of us doing it.
Our Japanese Maple trees leaf out, and the grasses are green again. The rain fills the bird-bath, and sometimes our resident squirrel comes in for a drink.
On my drive to work in the morning, I travel the roads on the perimeter of Paine Field, the Snohomish County Airport. There are five of these flowering cherry trees, which are actually pretty old. This year, the flowers were so heavy, the branches were dipping almost to the ground.
This year, to spite the Government lockdown, I got in the car and drove up to the Skagit Valley in March to take a look at the tulip fields. It was too early for tulips, but the blueberry vines were just about to start budding.
Last year, the tulips were in full bloom in April. It’s a wonder, being able to get out of your car, and walk through the fields of brightly-colored flowers. Tiptoe through the Tulips, indeed!
A bit farther west of the tulip fields is the town of LaConner, on the Swinomish Slough. Salmon swim up the channel, and local sculptors have captured some.
And Life flows on, within you and without you… George Harrison
The latest “expert” opinion on the Wuhan Coronavirus Crisis, brought to you in all its Red, Communist plumage. Coronavirus expert estimates how long we will be required to wear masks.
This particular “expert” estimates that we will be required to wear masks when around other people for Several Years. How many of my readers are prepared to go out in public, to work, to shop, to a restaurant, or virtually anywhere, with your FACE, the part of you that makes you Human, covered by a mask, for the next Several Years? How many of us will be willing to literally never see the faces of our friends, relatives, coworkers, and family, for years to come?
And who will be doing the requiring? Will the CDC, who has been fudging the statistics for months, issue the proclamation that masks should be required, literally forever? We all know that Democrat governors and mayors all over the country have been reveling in their power to literally stop their economies in their tracks, by executive orders never sanctioned by their elected legislatures. And they love being able to decide what kinds of businesses are “essential”, and which are non-essential, thus picking winners and losers (except for the fact that all businesses have been losers in one way or another from the Chinese-introduced virus).
The governor of my state of Washington has made mask-wearing in public Mandatory, State-wide. Even in small towns in Eastern Washington with few cases. I am already defying that mandate, and if the so-called expert referenced above is believed by the powers that be, I will defy that mandate also.
I am hoping that this will simply be a bridge too far for most people. Most of the people in my life have rolled over and played dead for Dimslee, and meekly go about with their masks on. Not I, said the nearly-retired Patriot.
For some reason, this song plays pretty often on my internal tape.
In the summer of 2010, Hubby and I took a three-week vacation, and drove from our home in Washington State to Michigan and back, for a Hillsdale Hostel. We took the Southern Route to get there, through Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Iowa, to get to Hillsdale. and we took the Northers route home, through Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, northern Montana, and Idaho.
The trip to Hillsdale took us by some very beautiful scenery, and the weather was excellent. Well, most of the time it was excellent. On the first day of driving, we crossed Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, and Montana, and spent the night in Missoula. The next day, we drove through a corner of Yellowstone National Park.
This formation is called “Devil’s Slide”, for obvious reasons! Sometimes I wished I had a geologist along to explain how those layers of rock, which start out horizontal, got tilted to be vertical! We do know that those rocks started out as layers of sand at the bottom of an ancient body of water. That’s the Yellowstone River just visible in the foreground.
Next, our journey took us through Wyoming. On another hot day, we visited another “devil”, the Devil’s Tower National Monument.
Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming
Boy, that Devil sure gets around! I have always loved that columnar basalt, created when layers of hot volcanic rock cool quickly, into lengths of hexagonal rock. Washington State has extensive bluffs of that same rock, along the Columbia River.
Next, we drove across South Dakota. 2010 was a pretty wet year, and we saw fields of tall green grass, and cows belly-deep in it. We stopped at the South Dakota Air and Space Museum, which has a number of old warplanes on the field outside. I captured this pair of house-finches enjoying the sunshine.
When we crossed the Missouri River into Iowa, the weather changed. Dramatically. We did our best to outrun a big thunderstorm across much of the state. This picture was taken through the windshield of the car barreling down the highway. It was pretty spectacular, and the outside temperature was in the 80s.
We made it to DesMoines just in time!
On the last day before we got to Hillsdale, we drove through Indiana, and made a pleasant stop in the town of Elkhart. Now, some of you might know what Elkhart was famous for many years ago, and that is brass band instruments. More than one manufacturer of horns was based in Elkhart, and we found a really fun outdoor art exhibit that celebrates that history.
My internal tape was playing 76 Trombones all afternoon!
We had a great time at Hillsdale, taking classes taught by Hillsdale faculty, meeting people from all over the country, and sightseeing around the area.
On our way home, we took the Northern Route. We knew we were back in Eastern Washington, when we saw this. That Devil must have been following us all the way!
This year of 2020, when we Americans should be celebrating American Exceptionalism-the big difference in America’s founding and history from every other nation on Earth; our great country is riven by rioting, looting, Marxism, ugliness, vandalism—oh, and also a worldwide pandemic of a virus that originated in Communist China.
Instead of the sound of parades, brass bands playing Stars and Stripes Forever, and laughing children; we hear screams, bullhorns, and the rending sounds of toppling monuments. Instead of praise for the Founding Fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and all the others, we hear praise for career criminals and Marxist fugitives.
The government school systems all across our country have produced a generation of youth who are taught that their country was illegitimately founded by a bunch of nasty bigoted, misogynistic, racist conquerors whose only interest was killing the natives they found here and taking over their land. They were taught that the founders of America, because most were White and Male, were, by their very nature unfit to govern the population. They are now being taught that the prime important date in America’s history was 1619, the year that the first “slave ship” docked. And it is those youth who are now engaging in orgies of destruction, motivated by a so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement whose founders are avowed Marxists who despise America and wish to take it down.
We should be looking to all the manifestly great things that America, as founded, has done for those of us fortunate enough to have been born here, as well as the millions of legal (and too many illegal) immigrants who voluntarily left their own countries to seek a more-productive life here in America. Those youth who constantly denigrate America should try spending a year or so in Cuba or Venezuela, and then see how they like it, compared to their pretty cushy life here.
This year in America, Summer has been Cancelled, due to the effects of the WuhanCoronavirus, and the destructive Lockdowns perpetrated by the state and local Governments. Everyday American citizens have been isolated from their friends and neighbors, schools closed (keeping children from their friends), offices and factories closed (resulting in massive unemployment and business failures), and city streets emptied. The Virus did not cause this, the Governments did; making Policy at the behest of so-called Experts whose advice changes seemingly daily. State governors and city mayors have become drunk with power, and they continually increase their decreed control over their citizens. Most of the people of this great nation have become compliant sheep, going around in masks, and obeying every proclamation from their Masters. Never before in the history of this country has the economy been nearly totally brought to a screeching halt by any disease. Even smallpox epidemics, and the Spanish Flu of 1918 did not see the total shutdown of the economy, with all its destruction.
The people of America are tired, and angry, and sick of being quarantined. They see massive “demonstrations” against “police brutality”; thousands of people in the streets, with NO “social-distancing” or mask-wearing. And when the “new cases” of viral disease spike, they hear NO mention of those mass demonstrations as the cause.
And this year, perhaps we fortunate Americans should be thinking of those Citizens ofHong Kong, whose previous liberty and prosperity is being taken away by Communist China. Just this week, the Communist Chinese passed a new national security law, given them increased control of Hong Kong, in violation of the Basic Agreement signed in 1989 when Britain ceded control of the island (perhaps now looking like a bad idea). Going forward now, the Communists will be in tighter control, and can arrest and detain Hong Kongers at will and take them back to the mainland for “trial”.
The immediate impact is likely to be suppression of an antigovernment protest movement, whose demonstrations, within a comfort zone that protected rights to publicly question authority, were fueled by widespread public misgivings over Beijing’s growing influence.
The increase in the Communists’ power threatens all that has been beneficial about Hong Kong, including its economic freedom and rule of law. In Communist countries, there is no such thing as rule of law, and citizens can be detained for any reason, for any length of time, with no recourse. Already, bookstore owners and newspaper editors in Hong Kong have been “disappeared” by the Communists, simply vanishing. For about 100 years, Hong Kong has been a haven of economic liberty in Asia, and those days are coming to a close. The US has already declared that Hong Kong is no longer “semiautonomous”, and this declaration means that Hong Kong will no longer be treated as a free trading partner. The Communists of mainland China are killing the Golden Goose of their own prosperity.
So, on this Independence Day, all Proud American Citizens should stand up and cheer. Praise this Great Country, sing God Bless America or the Star-Spangled Banner, and be happy that you were born in the United States of America, the
For nearly a month now, activists have occupied a portion of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Those activists and their hangers-on have barricaded the streets; desecrated the Seattle Police East Precinct and prevented the Police from returning there; broken windows and graffiti-tagged businesses in their “zone”; and allowed multiple shootings and two deaths. The shooting victims were all Black men. Do you see the Mayor decrying those deaths, and bringing the murderers to justice?
No, the Mayor is actually sympathetic to the Antifa and other so-called activists’ demands, and, funny thing, the vast majority of those wreckers are White! For a month, the mayor has let those destructive, law-breaking activists hold part of her city, and has refrained from arresting them all and clearing out their manifestly illegal blocking of city streets. Even the Black police chief, Carmen Best, has refrained from actually doing anything to remove the occupiers from city streets and let HER police officers back into their precinct station. She comes out with these wimpy statements:
“Enough is enough,” she said during an impromptu Monday morning press conference with reporters. “It’s very fluid, (and) it’s very unfortunate that we have another murder in this area identified as the CHOP.”
Weasel, weasel, weasel, weasel! What a total flop that police chief has been. And the Washington State Patrol has also been complicit to a large degree, willingly blocking off both directions of Interstate Highway 5 going through downtown Seattle every time the demonstrators decide to walk onto the freeway. I am on the Washington State Department of Transportation’s mailing list for long-haul truckers, and I have seen multiple messages a day noting the blockage of I-5 with no reason given (perhaps they are afraid to tell the truckers the reason they cannot proceed down the highway with their goods).
The White Mayor of Seattle and the Black Police Chief exhibit racist behaviors in their lack of action to bring the murderers of black men, and the occupiers of City streets to Justice. Do not believe one word they say about Black Lives Mattering to them. Their actions say otherwise.
A surprise is something unexpected, exciting, thrilling.
On our Hillsdale College cruise to Hawaii in 2018, we had a few hours in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. We were taking a rest in a pleasant little shopping center, deciding where to go next, when I happened to glance at a tree behind me, and saw the big snail. I got out my camera to take his picture, when I noticed, on the opposite side of his tree, a little green lizard! I never would have noticed him if I hadn’t been zooming in on the snail. And I’m pretty sure neither knew the other was there!
I also got a big kick out of this sign we saw in a coffee shop right by the dock where the cruise ship’s boat let us off. How many places do you know where kids who misbehave are offered this?
Mongoose? Someone at that coffee-shop has a great sense of humor.
