Roosengarde Raid
Apr. 18th, 2004 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothSo, my mother's in town visiting this weekend, which means that I'm visiting with not only her, but my sister and her family who live over in Magnolia, which isn't too far. Yesterday I was off work, so before the Shadake game I was over there helping mom and Anna dote on Stevie, Anna's little baby.
He *is* getting more interesting the older he gets -- he's able to grab things now, as well as drool on them. I had fun pushing him around in a stroller (of sorts) and pretending to lose control and swerve from side to side, or lose my grip and push him along the sidewalk while I ran after trying to catch him. He loved those sort of games, and kept going 'Waaah!' which apparently meant 'more' every time I tried to stop. I had to cut out the silly stuff when we got to a busier part of town, with less of a margin between the sidewalk and the street, though.
Today, we had a big trip planned, to see the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. The word is, they had lots of tulips. So I headed over there around 11am (which left me time to pick up the week's comics first) and got to wait until 1pm for mom and Anna to get back from the library book sale where they'd sort of lost track of time. I talked some with Alex, and played some game boy, and read the comics I'd just picked up.
Since we were already running late, we hurried out the door, taking only an hour to get the baby dressed and do a few other random things. It took an hour and a half to drive up to Skagit Valley, and a half hour to find an actual tulip farm that hadn't already been harvested -- most of the tulip fields were nothing but cut stems.
So we stopped at a tourist farm, 'Roosengarde', and after an hour or so getting the baby out of the car seat (GOD, how I wish I was exaggerating) and dressed in his cute little 'walking around' outfit and shoes and hat, and going to the bathroom, and getting all the things we'd need to walk around a garden and collecting them from various places in the car into a bag, we were ready to cross the street, stand in front of some tulips, and take about twenty pictures.
Then Alex decided that we'd gone in the wrong end of the farm, and led us back to the road, to the other end of the parking lot, and to the main entrance, where we paid money to get into the actual tulip gardens. The gardens were a bit past their prime -- most of the tulips were wilting and about to lose their last few petals. It smelled like manure, and was extremely crowded. The smell reminded Alex of a song, which he subjected us to later in the car.
The worst part of the garden, though, was that it was impossible to make progress. Either mom or Anna or Alex was stopping to take a picture of the tulips or of Steve or both, or someone else in front of us was taking a picture and we had to wait to keep their field of view clear, or we were in a traffic jam with large groups of people trying to go different directions on the same two-foot-wide path. It got a little better once we were out of the garden and back to the fields, but that just meant there was more time to take a million identical pictures of 'Baby and Flowers'. Mom went through two rolls of film.
The baby was getting fussy, so Anna took him back to the car to nurse him while the rest of us headed to the gift shop, where we'd be able to get $2 off by showing our garden admission tickets, if we spent $15 or more. The shop was a typical gift shop, except that since the theme was 'tulip farm' there were tulips on everything. I found the girliest shirt ever in the history of the world -- lavender, with embroidered purple and pink tulips. Just looking at it, I could feel the testosterone draining from my body.
There were also pretty mugs made of blue glass, which had the explanation for why the farm was called 'Roosengarde'. It meant 'rose town', which (as they explained) was not even remotely appropriate for a tulip garden, but it *sounded* cool, and wasn't that the important thing?
Eventually, we returned to the car, where the baby was sleeping peacefully. Our approach woke him up, so Anna started nursing him, and after only an hour or so of that and of putting things back in the car, we were off, to Deception Pass.
Deception Pass is not a pass. It's the straight separating Whidbey Island from the mainland. Signs explained that Vancouver, exploring the area, was 'deceived' by its twisting, island-filled, cliffy nature into assuming it was merely a pass and that Whidbey Island was a peninsula, and so gave it its name (and named the island after his first mate Whidbey, who actually discovered the pass's true nature).
We had some fun giggling over 'deceived' and making little quotation marks, standing on a rock on top of the mid-'pass' island in the middle of the bridge, where there was some free parking. There were nice views, off the bridge and *under* the bridge down the side of the island.
By then it was getting late, so we headed home, and had some fancy-schmancy pizza and watched TV. Anna bemoaned that we were breaking the 'TV rule', which was 'no TV in front of the baby', because supposedly it'll give the kid ADD. So we switched off watching Futurama and Buffy on Replay TV and distracting the baby from looking at the horrible evil poisonous television.
After a little bit of that, everyone was tired except for the baby, so I headed home. I'll be back tomorrow, where I'm sure we'll find something equally exciting to fill our Sunday.
He *is* getting more interesting the older he gets -- he's able to grab things now, as well as drool on them. I had fun pushing him around in a stroller (of sorts) and pretending to lose control and swerve from side to side, or lose my grip and push him along the sidewalk while I ran after trying to catch him. He loved those sort of games, and kept going 'Waaah!' which apparently meant 'more' every time I tried to stop. I had to cut out the silly stuff when we got to a busier part of town, with less of a margin between the sidewalk and the street, though.
Today, we had a big trip planned, to see the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. The word is, they had lots of tulips. So I headed over there around 11am (which left me time to pick up the week's comics first) and got to wait until 1pm for mom and Anna to get back from the library book sale where they'd sort of lost track of time. I talked some with Alex, and played some game boy, and read the comics I'd just picked up.
Since we were already running late, we hurried out the door, taking only an hour to get the baby dressed and do a few other random things. It took an hour and a half to drive up to Skagit Valley, and a half hour to find an actual tulip farm that hadn't already been harvested -- most of the tulip fields were nothing but cut stems.
So we stopped at a tourist farm, 'Roosengarde', and after an hour or so getting the baby out of the car seat (GOD, how I wish I was exaggerating) and dressed in his cute little 'walking around' outfit and shoes and hat, and going to the bathroom, and getting all the things we'd need to walk around a garden and collecting them from various places in the car into a bag, we were ready to cross the street, stand in front of some tulips, and take about twenty pictures.
Then Alex decided that we'd gone in the wrong end of the farm, and led us back to the road, to the other end of the parking lot, and to the main entrance, where we paid money to get into the actual tulip gardens. The gardens were a bit past their prime -- most of the tulips were wilting and about to lose their last few petals. It smelled like manure, and was extremely crowded. The smell reminded Alex of a song, which he subjected us to later in the car.
The worst part of the garden, though, was that it was impossible to make progress. Either mom or Anna or Alex was stopping to take a picture of the tulips or of Steve or both, or someone else in front of us was taking a picture and we had to wait to keep their field of view clear, or we were in a traffic jam with large groups of people trying to go different directions on the same two-foot-wide path. It got a little better once we were out of the garden and back to the fields, but that just meant there was more time to take a million identical pictures of 'Baby and Flowers'. Mom went through two rolls of film.
The baby was getting fussy, so Anna took him back to the car to nurse him while the rest of us headed to the gift shop, where we'd be able to get $2 off by showing our garden admission tickets, if we spent $15 or more. The shop was a typical gift shop, except that since the theme was 'tulip farm' there were tulips on everything. I found the girliest shirt ever in the history of the world -- lavender, with embroidered purple and pink tulips. Just looking at it, I could feel the testosterone draining from my body.
There were also pretty mugs made of blue glass, which had the explanation for why the farm was called 'Roosengarde'. It meant 'rose town', which (as they explained) was not even remotely appropriate for a tulip garden, but it *sounded* cool, and wasn't that the important thing?
Eventually, we returned to the car, where the baby was sleeping peacefully. Our approach woke him up, so Anna started nursing him, and after only an hour or so of that and of putting things back in the car, we were off, to Deception Pass.
Deception Pass is not a pass. It's the straight separating Whidbey Island from the mainland. Signs explained that Vancouver, exploring the area, was 'deceived' by its twisting, island-filled, cliffy nature into assuming it was merely a pass and that Whidbey Island was a peninsula, and so gave it its name (and named the island after his first mate Whidbey, who actually discovered the pass's true nature).
We had some fun giggling over 'deceived' and making little quotation marks, standing on a rock on top of the mid-'pass' island in the middle of the bridge, where there was some free parking. There were nice views, off the bridge and *under* the bridge down the side of the island.
By then it was getting late, so we headed home, and had some fancy-schmancy pizza and watched TV. Anna bemoaned that we were breaking the 'TV rule', which was 'no TV in front of the baby', because supposedly it'll give the kid ADD. So we switched off watching Futurama and Buffy on Replay TV and distracting the baby from looking at the horrible evil poisonous television.
After a little bit of that, everyone was tired except for the baby, so I headed home. I'll be back tomorrow, where I'm sure we'll find something equally exciting to fill our Sunday.
