Tulip Festival 2021 — Fruitcake Enterprises

I wish I had more time to write about today in detail, but it's 10:27 p.m. as I begin writing this, I am tired, and tomorrow is Easter and I hope to head down to Olympia relatively early. For some reason those dipshits running the SAG Awards decided to air the show Easter Sunday evening, and I want to be back home in time to watch them. Also, my intention is to spend most of our time in Olympia outside, which will also narrow down the amount of time we spend there, but Dad had said he wanted to take a walk on a newly opened nearby pedestrian and bike path. Even if we knock that out early on, if we get there by 10 a.m. (which right now seems somewhat iffy) by the time we're done walking we'll still only have four or five hours before we want to head back home.

Anyway! The point is, tomorrow is Easter, so that will immediately overtake any writing I do here, which is another reason I want to get a post about today, posted today.

You may or may not recall that we actually attempted a day trip to the Tulip Festival last year, on my actual birthday, in the hopes of at least seeing flowers in bloom even though we knew COVID closures would have kept us from getting into either Tulip Town or Roosengaarde. And what we discovered was that all the tulips had already been harvested, so although we did have the very cool discovery of Little Mountain (which we went to again today), there were almost no blooming tulips or daffodils to be seen.

I'm realizing something about that in retrospect today, though. All this time I had assumed they had harvested the flowers by the time we got there, to discourge people from driving up there instead of staying home during the state's stay-home orders. But! Typically the Tulip Festival is the entire month of April, in which case, I realize now, probably most or all of the flower fields would have been harvested by April 30 even during a normal year anyway.

This year had a halfway-similar effect, only because we went up at the start of the month instead of in the middle. (Side note: the Tulip Festival is back on, officially, only with timed entry tickets to cut down on crowds and make social distancing easier.) Being only April 3, many of the flowers were simply not yet in bloom, or just starting to bloom—as in the photo of Shobhit and me at the top of this post.

But, we still went to the requisite stops: Tulip Town, Roosengaarde, and then, just as we had last year, to a plant nursery and a farmers market—again the same ones we went to last year.

And! We actually met up with Mimi! (She recently retired as the Customer Service Manager at PCC, a couple of years ago, and she and her husband now live their retirement in Mount Vernon.) She had been unwilling to meet up when we were there last year, even to see each other outside somewhere; she and her husband are now both fully vaccinated, however. I got the distinct sense that she would have invited us over to their place for a visit were Shobhit and I both two weeks past our second shots, but as we are both in between shots, she instead suggested we meet at a nerby alpaca farm. She was willing to meet us outside her house this time, at least.

In fact, she had joined a co-op wide Zoom going-away party yesterday for Scott M, one of our office staff, currently an Operations Manager but previously Store Director at many stores, who is retiring after working for PCC for 31 years. Mimi sent me a DM in the Skype call to say hi, and that was when I mentioned we would be in Mount Vernon today. I was just making conversation, really, but she told me to call her text her when we were in the area. I had actually kind of forgotten about that and she texted me while we were at Tulip Town.

I told her we still needed to go to Roosengaarde, and she had a call with someone else scheduled at 11:30 which evidently lasted more than an hour. Shobhit and I got inside Roosengaarde at noon, half an hour earlier than our ticketes were timed for, and after we left there was when we made the other little errands. And finally, we met up with Mimi at a place called Bunkhouse Boutique at South Fork Farms, where they have a bunch of alpacas you can feed for a small fee.

So long as we had masks on, Mimi was evidently fine with us all going inside that little Bunkhouse Boutique together, which is where you see her in the photo above—holding one of their alpaca wool products for sale. It's a giant ball of wool to hang outside for birds, which take bits of it for their nests, apparently.

We weren't at the Bunkhouse Boutique for a huge amount of time, probably somewhere between half an hour and forty-five minutes. But, it counts! Mimi gets a Socal Review Point! (So does Shobhit, obviously.) I got a few pictures, and those as well as the rest I took all day today can be found in the full photo album on Flickr here.

Incidentally, not only is this the tenth time I have gone to the Tulip Festival since first going in 1999, it's also now the fifth year in a row that Shobhit and I have gone. It's also the largest photo album that I have for it, at 75 shots, since 2006—a year with an advantage because it was a family gathering over three days.

Anyway. I will likely write up a requisite "travelogue" email covering this weekend, thus both the Tulip Festival and Easter, early next week. I'll copy over a lot of that text into captions on many of these photos, which I have not yet had time to caption; right now that best I can do is have them tagged. At least they're uploaded, though. But now I really need to get ready for bed.

[posted 10:57 pm]