Whidbey Island / Tulip Festival 2022

[From travelogue email sent . . . later this evening, actually]Mukilteo A truly rare thing occurred last weekend, in which Shobhit had both days off of work. He always wants to go to the Tulip Festival in Skagit County—which I've now been to eleven times in the past 23 years, but six in as many of the past years in a row (although the tulips had all already been harvested when we drove up there in 2020, our first day trip after pandemic stay-home orders had happened)—so, I suggested one of the days this weekend for that. But, I also suggested we drove up there via Whidbey Island, and make use of our Discover Pass for Washington State Parks. Thus: the first stop was the Mukilteo Ferry Terminal, which looked quite new to me. I could not recall it looking like this, with a wooden motif, any previous time I was there. Turns out I was right: a new terminal opened there in December 2020, its design "inspired by a Coast Salish longhouse." Apparently a longhouse is "a gathering place in tribal communities for ceremonies, celebrations and storytelling." The terminal is more seismically sound than its predecessor, which I totally forgot was right next to Mukilteo Lighthouse Park but is now shifted about four blocks east along the Mukilteo waterfront, and was the first new Washington State ferry terminal to open in forty years.

Hey, speaking of Mukilteo Lighthouse Park! Some of you may recall that it was part of my "Washington State Parks Tour" for my Birth Week last year, even though it's now technically a Mukilteo city park—but it used to be a Washington State Park (from the 1950s until 2003) so I included it, meeting Shauna there. Well, I also brought our binoculars on this day trip, and got this nice, if kind of hazy, shot through the binoculars of Mukilteo Lighthouse Park from the ferry on the water.

Langley Hey look, it's Laurie H! The POS person at PCC's Columbia City store, and at Seward Park prior to that before Columbia City replaced it—she started in 1986. She also noted she's been a PCC member since 1975, so I then noted that was a year before I was born. When she started at Seward Park, she lived half a block from the store—and still lives in that house. For now, at least. She and her husband Carl bought a house they plan to retire in, on Whidbey Island, five years ago. Shobhit and I actually looked up the address on Zillow and the estimated value of the property has doubled in that time. Anyway, they had been renting the house out temporarily but plan to move into it permanently when they retire. They currently spend weekends out there, and when I happened to mention to Laurie over email that we'd be driving though Whidbey Island over the weekend, she invited us to drop by the house and so we took her up on the offer. Their property is quite large, 2.72 acres, with a lot of gardening spaces both in front and, in the case of the above photo, behind their house. Apparently Laurie's son built that greenhouse-type structure but it was damaged in a windstorm.

The front of Laurie and Carl's house. I had to include this shot because that strip curving to the right in front of the house is all Amazon boxes that Laurie has placed there for mulch.

Freeland Next stop: Freeland. Well, nominally, anyway; Langley has an estimated population of just over a thousand, and Freeland's just over 2100—down from over 4,000 in the 2000 Census, incidentally. Anyway, Langley is a city and Freeland is an unincorporated "census-designated place," and in either case, both Laurie and Shelley, pictured standing on the balcony in the photo above, live so far out of these respective towns they might as well just be considered living in the country. I only used these two town names because that's what gets used on their respective addresses. Shelley lives so far out in the middle of nowhere, in fact—two miles due north of the spot on Highway 525 that's 12 and a half miles west of the Clinton ferry terminal—that the final road out to her place isn't even paved. The GPS on my phone kept saying "Your destination is on the right," where there was just forest. We got confused, turned around twice, and only finally found this place when we decided to drive a few hundred yards further along the dirt road. The place Shelley is renting, temporarily, is fascinating. The ground floor is the shop where the lady who owns the property forges art pieces out of tiles and other materials. Whenever the landlady visits, she stays in a camper trailer set up outside. The apartment Shelley rents is on the top floor, granting pretty nice views of the surrounding woods. Shelley said it makes her feel like she's living in a treehouse. Shelley used to live in Wallace, Idaho, where my late mother and late stepfather had lived for two decades. Mom and Bill had long lived on disability, and had multiple types of caregivers who came to the house to help them out. Some of them did chores around the house, that sort of thing. Another position was for "psychosocial rehabilitation," a term that was new to me when I first met Shelley, as it's a type of caregiving that involves mental health support. Shelley was referred to as "Mom's PSR," and they remained friends even after Shelley could no longer hold the position, for reasons I can't recall. In any case, she was around during my annual visits to Wallace between 2015 and 2018, and then she moved to Whidbey Island. I have been promising to come by to say hi sometime since well before Mom died of a stroke in 2020 (and Bill died of Covid in 2021), and on this day we finally made it happen.

We were only at Shelley's maybe 45 minutes before we needed to move on to the rest of our day, but just before we left I asked to get a group selfie. To say the feeling I get when looking at this photo is bittersweet would be a bit of an understatement. If Mom were still alive, she'd have been delighted to see this shot.

South Whidbey State Park After moving on from initial detours to swing by a couple of friends' places, we set about making use of our 2022 Discover Pass: first to South Whidbey State Park, a 7-mile, 12-minute drive from Shelley's place to the western shore on the southern half of Whidbey Island. Directly across the water from this park is Marrowstone Island, at the northern tip of which is Fort Flagler State Park, which Shobhit and I went to for a picnic lunch before attending my great aunt, Auntie Rose's memorial service last October. And that was our main activity here, too: bagel sandwiches and chai, which we ate on the benches of the park's small amphitheater.

We then took the 0.3-mile "Beach Trail" down to the beach, even though the last leg of it is ostensibly closed "due to damage." You can see the sagging staircase here, with Shobhit barely visible standing on the small landing just above it. We had walked down just to see how far we could go, and we asked a family passing us the other direction about it. "It's not easy, but it's not hard," the mom said. "We all made it, with the kids and the dogs." But, once Shobhit saw this, he was not willing to navigate the tricky rest of the way down—even I had to be rather careful, holding onto the leaning staircase railing while walking down what barely counted as muddy steps in the dirt, then move underneath the staircase and climb down some other fallen wood planks and small logs to get to the beach. But I made it!

Fort Casey State Park Probably the most fun surprise, and the stop that yielded the most photos, was Fort Casey Historical State Park, which we had no idea features a gigantic, expansive fort cut into the back side of the hill that makes the cliffs overlooking the western shore of the island, first constructed in the late 19th century. Western Washington has several of these old military forts converted into state parks around Puget Sound, but I had never seen one with a still-intact and visible forth this wide. It made me think of hobbits, if they were a military operation. Also: before moving on to the next photo, note the cannon seen at the far right.

The aforementioned canon, seen from the hillside on the other side of the fort. It's one of two "disappearing guns" still there at the fort, and they could be lowered down and out of sight. When fired, they apparently had a range of eight miles. Newer warships and the advent of airplanes rendered these obsolete by the 1920s.

Shobhit looks out from one of the two observation towers that stand behind the fort.

Fort Ebey State Park I have now been to Fort Ebey State Park two times: once in 2010, as part of a very cool, creatively designed "scenic drive" my dad mapped out for us as a gift for Christmas 2009; and now this past weekend as part of another day trip with many stops. I still need to go back as just a dedicated day trip to only this spot; I feel as though I have only seen but a small fraction of the park even after two times there. (I actually had kind of assumed Fort Ebey must be the biggest state park on the island, but, at 651 acres, it turns out to be smaller than Fort Casey State Park's 999 acres.) Occasionally I talk to Claudia about taking a day trip to this park, and I'm still perfectly happy to return any time. Do you hear that, Claudia! Or I guess, read it.

Both times to Fort Ebey, so far, have been with Shobhit. This park is similar to Fort Casey with its gun batteries hidden in the hillsides—the difference seemed to be that they are far more obscured by their natural surroundings at Fort Ebey, whereas Fort Casey has that gigantic fort kind of shockingly visible when you arrive. And because we spent so much time at Fort Casey, we couldn't spend a lot of time at Fort Ebey before we had to get a move on; we were here barely twenty minutes. I still got some good photos, though, from vistas on even higher cliffs over Whidbey Island's western shoreline maybe three quarters of the way up the island from its south end.

Skagit Valley After Fort Ebey State Park, we were going to go to Fidalgo Fudge Co. in Anacortes, to get fudge from a wider variety of flavors than we had purchased at the Tulip Festival last year—but, while still at Fort Casey, I looked it up and discovered they are closed on Sundays. Dammit! So: off to Skagit Valley we went, this being the longest stretch of driving before heading back home, 32 miles and about a 45-minute drive. Our first stop was the first of three places Shobhit likes to go shopping at whenever we go to the Tulip Festival, this now being the third year in a row that we've gone to all three places. The first was Schuh Farms in Mount Vernon, where Shobhit often likes to get some produce but they didn't have what he was looking for this time. That didn't stop him from buying three mini pies. We ate the strawberry rhubarb one for dessert last night, his having chosen that flavor likely in part after Laurie told him about the rhubarb she had growing in one of her garden plots. Anyway I took this shot of their barn outside. It made me think of the oncoming twister in The Wizard of Oz.

Next stop: Azusa Farm & Gardens, where Shobhit went looking for gardening supplies now that he's about to start tending gardens in our condo building's pea patch again. They have a resident cat. I took its photo last year too and I keep forgetting to ask what its name is. How the hell am I supposed to tag the cat properly on my Flickr account!

Then: the produce stand in Mount Vernon Shobhit first discovered when we drove to Skagit Valley in 2020 (even though the tulips had already been harvested, to prevent crowds during stay-home orders), Country Farms, which he also comes back to every year. He gets a ton of produce, but also, after finding the selection at Azusa Farm lacking, found what ultimately became 24 plant starts he got for his pea patch plots at home.

Tulips Remember when I said I had gone to the Tulip Festival 11 times since 1999? Well, that's counting 2020, for example, when there were actually no tulips to see. Every other year, though, we have gone to both Tulip Town and Roosengaarde—both highly popular annual tourist attractions, with entry fees, that are arguably essential parts of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Well, this year would qualify as the first in which we went to Skagit Valley during the Tulip Festival, while flower fields were in bloom, but we did not go to the official tulip farm locations. By the time we reached Skagit Valley and were done with the shopping, it was about a quarter to 6 p.m., too late logically to visit any tulip farms even if they were open until 7:00 (which I saw as hours listed online but we did pass by both locations and they appeared to be closed). We just drove by whatever flower fields we could find that were near the road—it's something you can fairly easily do. They also grow daffodils, and I kind of love the above shot. As much as I increasingly feel like going to the tulip festival every single year is unnecessary considering it's always the same (I feel the same way about the Washington State Fair, which is why I deliberately go to that every three years), the weather tends to vary wildly year to year and depending on what part of the month you go. I love the juxtaposition of the dark sky and the daffodils lit brightly by sunbreaks from outside the frame of the photo.

Hey look, a perfect new user photo for all my socials! I feel like my matching hoodie is a happy accident here. I had gotten several photos after we were able to round a corner and get out for photos right at the edge of a tulip fields, with no tulip farm employees around to admonish us for being too close (hey, I didn't touch any or even walk in the middle of them!). I got another good 22 good shots of flower fields before we were done, and we only spent a few minutes on it.

Oh all right fine, I'll take one with my husband too! [posted 12:16 pm]

Tulip Festival 2021

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]