Tulips

Nothing says rural in our area, like the tulip farms.  They stretch out along the roads of Skagit Valley.  All month long in April is the Tulip Festival - lots of people coming from miles away to view the tulips - buy tulips - take photos of tulips.  There are Bulb Farms that are open during the festival and you can enjoy ice cream, salmon bakes and much more.  We choose to view the tulips on a quiet weekday evening - rather than the mad rush, hustle and bustle of the weekends.  We have the roads mostly to ourselves, except for local traffic - whereas on the weekends there are hours long traffic jams everywhere.

Rows of tulips - as far as the eye can see

Layers of color

If you catch the flowers at the right time, they are in full bloom.  In just a week or two the flowers will all be removed so the plant can concentrate on building the bulb for next season.  These are, after all, commercial flower bulb farms.

I'd never seen this before - with two colors in the same row.  The bulb diggers will have to be careful when they dig these rows, so they don't mix the two color of bulbs together.

Yellow tulips almost fully open

I like to catch the odd colored tulip in the fields - red in yellow

And yellow in red

This one seems to be red and yellow

And pink in red

We spent hours driving around from field to field - they have signs pointing to the tulip route.  Then we stopped and had a car picnic (this year it is still chilly in the early spring, some years it has been warm enough to eat outdoors) and then home, remembering the lovely fields of flowers.

Outdoor Wednesday 

Walk and Click 

Rurality