Hello, Yellow: The La Conner Daffodil Festival

March 9, 2015 Comments Off read Attractions, Pacific, The Great Outdoors, Travel, USA, Washington, West

I took a few more pictures with my old-timey lens and I still don’t know if I like it. Maybe I need to get better at photography in general before I start farting around with toys.

Put a fat bird on it, spruce it up, make it pretty!

My most recent bee-bothering

I’ve been to the tulip festival in Mount Vernon a few times, and while I was aware that earlier in the season there were also fields of irises and daffodils, I hadn’t actually made the trek to go see them until this year. I think that’s the case with a lot of people, as La Conner has recently dubbed the period before the tulips as the official daffodil festival in the effort to extend the flower tourism season. If you plant them, they will come…unless they don’t know about it.

As it turns out, Roozengaarde (the place where you can actually go and buy tulips during the tulip festival) plants more acres of daffodils than tulips–100 acres more! And as a bonus, before the tulips have bloomed, you can easily park in their lot and walk through their gardens for free. Admission is normally $5 so it’s not like you’re saving a ton of money, but it is a handy place to walk through if you want to take some selfies in front of a field of daffodils with Mount Baker in the distance. The effect of so many yellow flowers is undeniably cheery (try to deny it! I dare you!). It’s like spring up and slapped you in the eyeballs in the nicest way possible.

If you want to experience the daffodil festival, they’re holding some events through the month of March, including The Dandy Daffodil Tweed Bike Ride & Picnic which sounds delightful. Plus it’s late enough in the month that you’ll be bicycling around tulips as well!

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Spotted on the Roadside: A Rocket to Saturn

March 6, 2015 Comments Off read Pacific, Spotted on the Roadside, Travel, USA, Washington, West

As is only right and proper for “the center of the universe”, there’s a rocket smack in the middle of the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. Built from military surplus and originally displayed next to a surplus store in Belltown, the rocket launched to Fremont when its former location was scheduled for demolition in 1991. For the next three years, the rocket lay dormant in a back lot. There was a failed attempt to erect it in 1993, and it wasn’t until 1994 that it was finally reassembled in its current location. The rocket is branded with Fremont’s crest and motto (“De Libertas Quirkas” or “Freedom to be Peculiar”) and for a time, one was able to feed a coin into it and “launch” the rocket with a burst of steam from the bottom. That function is no longer operational and it appears there are no plans to restore it. At one time, there were plans to turn the rocket into a local FM radio station, but they have either been put on hold or abandoned entirely.

Twenty years later, across the street, a developer with roots in Fremont installed a giant fiberglass Saturn on top of his commercial building for the cost of about $25,000. That is some damn expensive whimsy! It’s not just decorative, however–Saturn has solar panels installed on its rings which feed into the building’s electrical grid and allow the planet to glow brightly as another integral element of Fremont’s weird galaxy.

Spotted on Evanston Ave, Seattle, WA.

The Lights of Christmas in Warm Beach, WA

December 29, 2014 2 Comments read Attractions, Pacific, Travel, USA, Washington, West

Over one million lights twinkle at The Lights of Christmas in Warm Beach, WA. Having seen a number of places tout the one million number this year, I have to assume that one million is the “stop counting” point for everyone. What I don’t know is how anyone can bill themselves as the largest light display if everyone sort of throws up their hands after the one million mark. I need to know which is actually the biggest without doing any tedious counting myself. I must see the best, the biggest! GIVE ME YOUR DATA!

Ahem. It’s hard not to feel the holiday spirit when the night blazes bright around you, strains of music hang in the air, and all around is your fellow man filled with wonder and delight. We buy a grease-spotted paper bag filled with piping hot doughnuts crusted with cinnamon sugar and kiss the sugar off each other’s lips. A choir sings carols, conducted by a woman whose elaborate arm and body movements look like nothing so much as airbending. Children labor as “elves” in a real workshop, and if you have cash, you can hang their fruits on your tree. One eyes me suspiciously as I take photographs. A gift shop hawks Santa-themed wares, including some cheerily painted on gourds. Trees shine so brightly that I have to turn away, dazzled, as the image hangs on my retinas. It’s a festive sort of pain.

One of the attractions at The Lights of Christmas is Bruce the Spruce, their talking Christmas tree. You may not know this, but approximately 98% of your time waiting in line to talk to a tree is spent panicking about what in the hell you could possibly say to a talking tree, and this panic is exacerbated when you overhear him asking other people to tell him a joke. Immediately, you will forget every joke you’ve ever heard, except for the ones that are entirely inappropriate to tell around children, and even then, you’ll only recall scraps of the lamest vaguely dirty Dad jokes, all the while moving ever closer to the front of the line. When my turn arrives, I manage to squeak out a question about whether he was the only talking tree and if he was “pining away” for friends, to which he responded with no fewer than three puns in a row, including bidding me farewell with “Cedar later!” I felt a deep and abiding shame that I had been beaten at wordplay by a tree, and spent the rest of the night constructing ever more contrived puns and sad jokes. Why shouldn’t you be afraid of a talking tree? Because his bark is worse than his bite. What did the talking tree do after he said his first word? Take a bough. What did the talking tree do after he was getting too big for his beeches? He went back to his roots. Why doesn’t a lumberjack make a good bedmate for a talking tree? He spends all night sawing logs. What does a talking tree wear to Warm Beach? His swimming trunk. What’s a talking tree’s best friend? A dogwood. …There were more. So very many more. I stopped counting at one million.