Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

The best part of my job isn’t the routine day-to-day interactions and speech therapy component. It’s the part where my co-workers have became my family and we ENJOY each other’s presence outside of work, including overnight weekend adventures. One such trip included spending a Saturday at the Annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Mount Vernon, WA. The title explains most of what the weekend entailed, however it doesn’t put the picture of rows and rows of beautiful, bloomed and color tulips in your mind. The Tulip Festival is in its 30th year and runs for the entire month of April.  Tulips are grown over 100s of acres in the region of the Skagit Valley. In 2012, the festival was privileged to have visitors from 49/50 states and approximately 53 countries, talk about popular!

Within the festival are two stunning gardens, RoozenGaarden (a Washington Bulb farm) and Tulip Town (the DeGoede farm), which are home to over 1 MILLION bulbs. The entire festival has more than 100+ tulip varieties and 150+ varieties in total- including daffodils, hyacinths, crocus, iris, and other types of flowers. This festival is more than just flowers. This festival has other special events (like signings), connected wine festivals, photo contests, art shows, tours, bike/running races, and food stands and farmer markets which make it worth a whole weekend!

Let’s be honest, I grew up in Phoenix so flowers can get fairly mundane after a while, which can only mean one thing…WINE! Yes, you guessed it, I found a local winery, Tulip Winery, and went in for a little tasting! I even meet the owner. Not a bad mid-day break from the flowers, if I do say so myself 🙂 For pictures, click here.

As a group, we decided we would stay up north in Bellingham, WA. Reason to stay that far north: we wanted to spend time wander/driving through the North Cascades National Park. It wasn’t the best of weather (well, typical weather for us here) but with cars and cameras the weather never crossed our minds! The day was spent driving along Highway 20 pulling off to the side of the road for waterfalls, farm houses and anything we thought would make a good picture. Oh, I probably should have mentioned my team members and I are a bit photographic obsessed 🙂 Can’t really ask for a better day with friends! Pictures from the NCNP

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