I have quite the eventful weekend going on this weekend—Shobhit and I went to Mount Vernon for the Tulip Festival yesterday. Mimi, who used to work at PCC and retired in 2017 before moving there with her husband, Steve, lives there. Shobhit and I have met up with her a couple of times, and we have talked over the years about actually coming up sometime to stay overnight—and, last night, we finally did it.
Today's post is meant to be focused on the Tulip Festival and staying the night with Mimi, but I still need to reference other stuff this weekend, because it affected our choice of timing or going to the Tulip Festival this year. I needed to burn through some PTO anyway, so I suggested to Shobhit that I take a day off so we could go on a weekday. Then, I suggested we go on Friday this weekend and see if Mimi and Stever are amenable to us staying the night, because we already had plans to attend my cousin Tammy and Erin's wedding in Everett today. Shobhit was a little more resistant to staying the night at Mimi's in the past, but it was easier to convince him this time for two reasons: First, he and I have met up with her a couple of times over the past few years while passing through Mount Vernon, which has made Shobhit progressively more familiar and comfortable with her. And second, this way we could simply stop in Everett for the wedding on our way back today. This saved us on mileage and gas as compared to, say, if we went up to Mount Vernon and back last weekend, only to go to Everett and back this weekend.
We also have Olympia to go to tomorrow, for Easter. But that's just a coincidence of timing: Easter happened to fall on Sunday of the weekend when Tammy and Erin decided to get married on Saturday. I'll be sharing more about both the wedding and Easter in later posts.
So: Shobhit already intended to do this, but Mimi also suggested we get an early start yesterday morning, because—and I had forgotten about this—it had taken us two and a half hours the last time we went up there, which was 2023—we actually skipped the Tulip Festival last year. But, I looked it up, and when we went last time, it was a Saturday, and even though Fridays are enough of "the weekend" for it to have weekend rates for ticketed points of interest, I think it actually was somewhat lower volume than a Saturday or Sunday. That combined with us still leaving early really worked well for us.
Plus, Shobhit needed to take a TPS Board call over Zoom between noon and 1:00, and he asked me to see if Mimi minded if we stopped by their place around 11:30 for him to set up for his call and take it there. Mimi was totally good with that, and very accommodating—and this was also part of the reasoning for her suggestion that we get an early start. Indeed, we were on the road by about 8:45 a.m., actually a bit later than Shobhit had hoped, but it still worked out fine.
There's a small group of shops we now
always stop at whenever we go to the Skagit Valley:
Christianson's Nursery, where Shobhit always buys several plant starts;
Schuh Farms, which sells produce but also plant starts, knickknacks, and delicious fresh baked goods and which we only learned this year from Mimi is only open about six months of the year; and
Country Farms, which is more of a produce stand in Burlington (the town directly north of Mount Vernon, across the Skagit River) and usually also sells plant starts, but which we may be crossing off our list as of this year. Their inventory was a fraction of what it was in years past, produce shelves only about half full, no plant starts and just a few potted plants on the ground. It sort of felt like maybe they had turned over to new ownership that was now running it into the ground. Shobhit didn't buy anything there this year. But, we did manage to get up to the Skagit Valley early enough yesterday morning to knock off all these stops before we went over for the first visit at Mimi and Steve's house—we usually stop by these places at the end of the day, before heading back home.
We made such good time, we were at Mimi and Steve's by about 11:10. We hung out and visited, and Shobhit got set up on the desk in the guest room where we later stayed the night. I continued visiting with Mimi and Steve on my own while Shobhit was on his call, and then we didn't even head out again until close to 2:00 in the afternoon. Mimi had suggestions of both a local downtown Mount Vernon bar for drinks and a restaurant for dinner, so we made a plan to meet up in downtown later. Shobhit and I thus headed out for roughly five hours of directly engaging with the Tulip Festival.
We did get some new perspectives on the festival this year, thanks to Mimi—plus, I had already learned of two new floral display farms, in addition Roozengaarde and Tulip Town, the two that have been in operation for decades. Shobhit and I last bought tickets to go inside both of those for our visit in 2021. Our trips to the Tlip Festival the
next two years were much more indirect: in 2022, we just drove by some tulip fields after taking a day trip exploring state parks on Whidbey Island; and in 2023, we did the same brief drive-bys the day of my Birth Week that we went up to check out the abandoned buildings of Northern State Mental Hospital (also with Mimi).
Indeed, we met up with Mimi both in 2021 and in 2023, and now again in 2025. I am only realizing as I write this very sentence that, since 2021, I have seen Mimi every two years.
Anyway! Mimi showed us this year's Tulip Festival brochure, and I learned of even a third newer display garden (Tulip Valley Farms). The other two that I had already discovered while doing online research were Skagit Acres, which turns out to be a "sister farm" to Tulip Town (which Steve said wasn't worth our time), and the one that turned out to be of highest interest to me,
Garden Rosalyn. Mimi told us Garden Rosalyn was operated by some Latino people who used to work for other display gardens, and that made me much more interested in supporting that place, if it was just one place we bought tickets to get into this year.
To be clear, RoozenGaarde, I think, is still the prettiest display garden of them all. But, we've done that one a bunch of times, and I liked the idea of finally experiencing something genuinely new, after having been to the Tulip Festival, in one way or another, every single year since 2017, with the exception of 2024 (indeed, we even went in 2020—although there were no tulips to see that year).
Mimi also told us about something else, which we never knew about: "
Talking Fields." These are not designed display gardens but just the huge fields of tulips, which are free to visit and have free parking, along with a QR code you can scan for agricultural information. So, when Shobhit and I set out, we went looking for these first, mostly because Mimi had marked a particular intersection on the brochure map—but, when Shobhit and I got to that intersection, there were no flowers to be found. They must have already been harvested. Well, we got back in the car, drove some more, and then found
Field #6 just by chance. It was very cool and quite beautiful.
Then, we headed to Garden Rosalyn. Shobhit was slightly ambivalent about paying the $17 each to get in, but I found it to be worth it. When you first walk in, it's tempting to think,
This is it? But, once you get in and start walking around, you realize it's much more elaborate than it appears at first glance, and is quite lovely, detailed, and charming. We spent all of about half an hour there, but I still managed to get about 30 great photos at that garden alone, which is 42% of the entire number of photos I took for the visit to Skagit Valley overall.
From there, we went to Skagit Acres, even though Steve had said it wasn't really worth the time—and he was right. But, Shobhit was hell bent on killing time so that dinner would wind up later in the evening, in the hopes that he would not overeat later due to having had dinner too early. Never mind that Mimi and Steve probably usually have dinner earlier, and we needed to get to the restaurant before they closed at 8:00; Shobhit couldn't be bothered to give a shit about that. (We got to the restaurant at about 7:15, which worked out fine actually. We even split an entree with the intent of limiting his Weight Watchers points. And then Shobhit asked to go over to the nearby Mod Pizza and buy a pizza anyway. All of this was incredibly irritating to me, even though the medium pesto pizza he bought, and which neither of us needed one bit, turned out to be truly delicious.)
I'm digressing. The display fields at Tulip Fields were not even as big as those at Garden Rosalyn, so far as I could tell, and the entry fee there was $20 per person. We didn't bother with that, but Shobhit did find one more plant start to buy. So I suppose to him, it was worth going to this last place that was several miles south of Mount Vernon.
Finally we made it to downtown Mount Vernon at about 5:00, and at Mimi's suggestion, we parked in the free parking garage that has four levels directly above the new
Mount Vernon Library Commons, opened just last year, and for which I made a
separate photo album. (This way I could make that part of my
libraries collection.)
I texted Mimi as soon as we parked, and Shobhit and I explored, both the moderately interesting views from the top, open-air level of the parking garage, and the new library on the ground floor, while Mimi made her way over. This was a $53 million civic project, and according to Mimi a lot of locals find it to be too modern looking for a small town—although, now that I look at it, Mount Vernon's population is 35,000 or so, which isn't
that tiny. Granted, the population of Capitol Hill alone in Seattle is comparable, but that's sort of beside the point. Mount Veron is still the anchor city of a small metropolitan population center, which amounts to about 130,000 people. It isn't exactly a village out in the sticks. Consdering that, I think now that perhaps the people who feel like the new library looks too much like something seen in "a big city" are in a bit of denial about their own urban growth. Just because there are countless tulip fields and beautiful natural vistas does not mean the area is exactly rural. (I would argue that Skagit Valley is rural; Mount Vernon is not.)
Anyway. Mimi arrived right at the time we were done exploring the library, as expected. Shobhit was fascinated to learn that their U.S. representative, Rick Larsen, was scheduled to attend an event there yesterday evening. So then, after a bit of confusion as to which exit we should meet Mimi at, the three of us—Steve did not come for drinks—walked over to the center of downtown Mount Vernon.
We discovered a street fair going on, which made Shobhit interested in browsing along the booths. We did that for a few blocks, and then made our way back. Finally we stopped at the place Mimi wanted to show us, called
Revival Lounge. They had very cool drinks, and I had the "Tulip," of course. Shobhit had a more basic cocktail, and Mimi, who apparently developed a mild condition that was easily solved by simply no longer drinking at all, had a shrub. We all just had the one drink, and sat outside in the patio seating. It was lovely. Shobhit noticed that all of the staff and all of the customers there were women, with the exception of him and me, two gay men. Not a straight man in sight! Mimi quipped that that wasn't so bad. We agreed that Steve is one of the good ones.
After that, we walked the couple of blocks back to our cars at the top of the parking garage above the library, and because Shobhit felt his drink was rather strong, he asked me to drive back to Mimi's place. There, Steve joined us, and we all rode in their car as Mimi drove us to a restaurant for dinner called
The Fairhaven. This was where Shobhit and I split a falafel wrap, which was quite large; plus the orders of onion rings and french fries that were shared for the table. Shobhit picked up the tab for dinner, as a thank-you for hosting us overnight.
We drove to Mod Pizza after that, and Mimi and Steve stayed in the car while Shobhit and I went inside to order. We took the pizza back to the house, and Mimi openly got a kick out of having "pizza for dessert" for the first time in her life. She also offered me a peanut butter brownie she had made, which I had been looking forward to ever since she first mentioned it, not knowing it was a wheat-free recipe she had made for a friend with a wheat sensitivity. When she asked how I liked it, I said, "You're right: it's different." That was as diplomatic as I could be. It wasn't disgusting, mind you, but there was no peanut butter taste to it (which was really just used as an ingredient to keep all the oats it was otherwise made of stuck together); it was fairly bland; and it was nothing like a peanut butter brownie you would expect from hearing that phrase. "I should probably call it peanut butter oat bars," Mimi said. Indeed.
As for this morning, Shobhit and I had toast for breakfast, along with coffee for him and tea for me, all at Mimi's suggestion while she and Steve were still sleeping. Mimi and Steve had a lovely pond just beyond their backyard, and Shobhit and I
sat at a table out back with that lovely view at a table with our laptops and hot drinks. I spent some time processing my photos of the Tulip Festival while we were out there, although after a while it just got too chilly—even with my shoes and my jacket on—and I had to come back inside.
Soon after that, I finally got ready, packed, and we were on our way. We were seven minutes out when Mimi texted that I had left the shirt I wore yesterday. Shobhit had a conniption, as though it was ruining our schedule for the entire day, but we went back, got the shirt, and still made it to the wedding probably a solid hour earlier than we needed to be. Still, the rest of the day was all right, but that's more for my next blog post.
It was really lovely to finally get to stay overnight at Mimi's place, as we have been talking about doing for years. Shobhit quite enjoyed himself as well, especially sitting on the back patio, how serene it was reminding him of the back patio at Faith's in Palm Springs—in spite of that desert environment being quite different. But, there's just something about a cool, quiet morning on a back patio. Who knows whether we'll ever stay the night again, but I
sure enjoyed doing it this time, and deeply appreciate the hospitality.
[posted 8:26pm]
