March 31, 2020

Skagit Valley Tulips

By roads-rus

DSC07800The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival can bring 1,000,000 people to the Skagit Valley in a good spring.  This year’s gathering would have brought tulip lovers here all of April, 2020, but not this year.  COVID-19 has caused its promoters to tell people not to come to Mount Vernon, which has no roadside services, for the 2020 festival.  Stay home and stay healthy they suggest.

The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival began 112 years ago.  An Englishman named George Gibbs moved to Orcas in the San Juan Islands about 30 years before and found the area especially well suited for growing tulips. By 1905 he had 15,000 bulbs from Holland to experiment with.  After World War II a man from The Netherlands named William Roozen, a successful bulb grower, brought tulip growing to the Skagit Valley between Seattle and Vancouver BC, others tulip lovers followed, and display gardens and the festival grew.

We are told to avoid super-spreading events and maintain social distancing while coronavirus rages, but a Washington State choir ignored this advice earlier in March and held a rehearsal.  They maintained social distancing and were careful about contact.  There had been no cases of the virus in Skagit County when 60 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale showed up for the rehearsal that lasted for more than 2 hours.  No one appeared sick, but 2 chorale members have since died from COVID-19.  Three weeks after this rehearsal, 28 singers tested positive for this virus and another 17 members showed symptoms but were not tested.  Experts believe that this gives credibility to the belief that this virus can be transmitted via microscopic particles in the air.  When people sing, they open their mouths widely and inhale and exhale a lot.

Be warned and only look at pictures of tulips this year.  Up top is “Blooming Tulips” by Chris Ward of Jerome, ID.  She made this hooked project that Ruth and I saw in a craft shop in Tillamook, OR.  I took the photo of it and the other 2, one just above and the other below.  I snapped Jeff Koons tulip sculpture when Steve Wynn first had it on display under his resort-casino in Las Vegas.  The 3rd photo, a field of tulips, proves that this flower does indeed grow beautifully in Washington State.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2020 at 9:01 pm and posted in Washington State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are disabled.

%d bloggers like this: