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.
