Tiptoeing through the Tulips...sort of.

This weekend, Jared and I took a trip to see the tulips blooming in Holland, Michigan...er, I mean, Mount Vernon, Washington. It's an easy mistake to make, though. Substitute Lake Michigan for the ocean and Dutch pride with hippies, and Holland pretty much becomes Mount Vernon--a town about 40 minutes south of Bellingham.

Mount Vernon is known locally for the annual Tulip Festival, which (as we found out) brings thousands of visitors over the course of a month to view the local tulip farms. Jared and I decided to join the throngs and see ourselves some tulip fields.

We started out at the Mount Vernon Street Fair, just one of the many local events that are taking place this month in honor of the tulip festival. We started to have a forboding feeling when we discovered that the entire highway was backed up with people trying to get down town. But we used our limited knowledge of the area to avoid traffic and ended up downtown where we needed to be.

At one point, we stopped to see a street performer wow the crowd with his juggling skills and off-color humor. 

Somehow, we ended up becoming his "favorite couple"--as we slipped away, we heard him lament "Oh, my favorite couple just left." After wandering around through booths of fried food and art, we decided we'd had enough of the crowds and moved on.

We determined that if we hit up the official tulip festival driving route in the late afternoon, we'd have a better chance of avoiding crowds. Unfortunately, we found out that this is not quite the case. Our driving tour of the tulip fields ended up being more of a waiting-in-traffic tour. Plus, we also learned that the tulip fields are mostly not located right near the roads; they're part of farms where you get to pay admission. So we viewed the brilliant patches of red and yellow from a distance while shaking our heads and searching the map for any hint of an escape route.

To make the best of our somewhat disasterous adventure, we headed into Anacortes for some dinner. On the way, we did stumble across a field located right on the road, and with no lines of cars. We couldn't resist.

So here we are, in front of the brilliant fields of tulips...

Wait, what? Those aren't tulips! They're daffodils!

Well, whatever the flower, it was a beautiful field, and I'll never turn down yellow flowers. 

It was a pretty good spot for an improptu photo op, too.

 Having been fully saturated with yellow, we moved on to chow down on some lovely Mexican food. While we were in town, we figured we should have at least one photo of a tulip...so here you go:

Not quite as majestic as the daffodil fields. But maybe I'm just a bit bitter.

After dinner, we headed to our favorite sunset spot at Oval Beach near Deception Pass. As usual, the sunset from this spot didn't disappoint.

Driving home, we both agreed that it was a pretty beautiful way to end our somewhat not-what-we-were-expecting yet wonderful day.