Tulip festival!

DH and I went to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm Festival on Saturday.  If you see pictures of gorgeous fields of tulips with Mt. Hood in the background, like this, they are not from Holland.  The windmill is a fake.  We reveled in the color and beauty.  And it was an amazingly warm spring day, so you can believe we reveled in that as well.  It was just freaking gorgeous all around us!!

Most of the field is sewn with single variety tulips, but one section is full of mixed bulbs.  It's such a joyful explosion of colors!  In fact, they have even marked off a couple of rows for people to pick their own tulips - 50 cents per stem.  I didn't get any.

Meanwhile, they have a craft fair running and someone was making kettle corn.  Imagine feasting your eyes on all this bounty while your nose is full of the scent of fresh-popped kettle corn (it's popcorn made in a giant open kettle with no oil, but several cups of sugar added at the start.  A sweating person equipped with a long wooden paddle stirs the mix over a high flame.  The sugar begins to caramelize and makes the corn pop.  The popcorn is dry, sweet, and addictive.  I paid wayyy too much for a small bag of it and ate it all within hours.  I have heard of this thing called self-control, but never have had any personal experience with it.

One year we came here and an East Indian family was here with many beautiful young women in saris.  They were posing the ladies in swathes of flowers that complemented their clothing.  The photographer was carrying a folding ladder, and would set it up so he could climb up high, shoot down, and show the ladies in a sea of pink or purple or scarlet or whichever color they had chosen.  I thought it was inspired photography!
Those beautiful graceful saris floating out in the breezes and those lovely dark-eyed girls laughing up at him.

So before next September rolls around, I will go on line and order up a bunch of bulbs from these folks.  They sell daffodil bulbs as well. and next spring, my front yard will be a sea of color as well.