Tulip Festival and Kite-Flying

Last Tuesday, Bede, Lucia and I went to the Annual Tulip Festival of Skagit County, Washington. We always go prepared for rain. Even when there's sunshine (as there was last Tuesday), we can almost always count on lots of mud. There's something wonderful for me about attending the Tulip Festival every year. It's not just looking at all the tulips and daffodils, lovely though they are. It's the one time of the year in which I go out of my way to appreciate my adopted home state of Washington. Many of my friends go hiking and skiing in the mountains on a regular basis. They are "connected to nature." Usually, I'm not likely to go hiking anywhere more adventuresome than the Arboretum. Mount Rainier has some good walking trails, but it's two hours away, and while we're sure Lucia would be cheerful for the drive out to Paradise, we're not so sure our girl would keep from having a meltdown on the return trip. The Tulip Festival, however, is only an hour's drive from where we live. With all of its open fields and muddy puddles, the festival is heaven for a child in rainboots. We don't spend that much time looking at the tulips up-close, but appreciate the swaths of color over the landscape:


Flower rainbow of Tulip Town


Alkelda and Lucia within the flower rainbow

I admit that one of the main reasons I like to go to the Tulip Festival is so that I can fly my little kite. The average kite needs 8-12 mph winds to stay up in the air. I have one of those kites, but I like my little 5 mph kite. I'm a beginning kite-flyer, and I need a bit of success at the onset for encouragement. While we have a Kite Hill at one of our parks, if the wind is good, the hill is filled with other kite-flyers. If I take my kite out to an open, empty field, there's a good bet that five minutes later, someone is going to start a baseball game. Normally, I'm a city girl to the bone, but when it comes to flying kites, I long for wide open spaces. I find those spaces at the Tulip Festival plus the bonus of children saying, "Look! A kite!"



Alkelda flies the kite (superimposed to show that in theory, there is something at the end of the string)

Lest you think that this storytelling blog is turning into a scrapbooking blog of my travels in the Pacific Northwest, here is a song about kites, and here is a story in which kites are important.