Tiptoeing Hodgepodge

Jo From This Side of the Pond is back this week a new set of Wednesday Hodgepodge questions!

1. What puts a spring in your step these days?

Getting small and large tasks accomplished.

2. April 2nd was National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Did you celebrate? Do you like PB and J? If so how do you like yours? What’s your favorite kind of jelly?

No peanut butter celebrations here in the past week. Yum and yes to PB and J. Toast with peanut butter and honey is a favorite. When enjoying PB with jam give me raspberry or strawberry please.

3. What’s a memory you associate with spring flowers?

The Skagit Valley Tulip festival in Washington State and visiting Roozengaarde farm and garden in Mt. Vernon, Washington. Skagit is the county where you find the towns that grow tulips in abundance. We’ve enjoyed tulip farms and tulips in Mt. Vernon and La Conner.

4. Three things on your spring bucket list? Do you have a spring bucket list? If not pretend you do.

Drop some pounds.
Travel over to the ‘coast’.
Start mowing the lawn again.

5. One place you will travel this spring? (It might be Europe or it might be the grocery store)

Waiting on our passports which needed renewing so no out of country trips this Spring. We will for sure travel south to Spokane for shopping at the big box stores. Hopefully (see #4) we will get a trip to the other side of the Cascades on the books.

6. Insert your own random thought here.

Speaking of the tulip festival…

You don’t have to go all the way to Amsterdam to enjoy tulips galore.

A New Week…

If you want to see fields and fields of tulips without traveling to Holland you need to come to Washington State in April.

Do you see the heart of pink tulips here?

We are fans of Roozengaarde in Mt. Vernon and always enjoy our visits to this beautiful garden and their tulip fields. Always make sure to have your mud boots with you when you visit the tulip fields.

We have had a weekend of keeping things clean and tidy and letting people traipse through our home at their whim. Sigh. Hope we sell soon so we can relax, a little. Hope all is well in your world.

A Host of Golden Daffodils!

Oh what a glorious Saturday my sisters and I enjoyed on a 10 hour outing north to Mount Vernon and La Conner and then beyond to Whidbey Island over Deception Pass and south the whole length of the island. In this post I’m showing the fields of daffodils we enjoyed. But…first things first, when visiting tulip or daffodils fields it is good to don your mud boots!

I was happy to be able to come up with 3 pairs of good mucking boots/shoes and borrowed the fourth pair from our DIL.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

William Wordsworth

From Mt. Vernon we traveled a short distance to La Conner for lunch and shopping. I’ll share some photos of our time there next. It was great to have leisurely time together to share about the challenges my oldest sister faces in caring for our dear old pop and the life changes my sister Vera faces in widowhood and moving out of the home she shared with her husband Nick. It’s good to let the tears roll freely and also to be able to laugh heartily with each other. Just for the record…we sisters have four brothers, too.

Signs and Fences with My Sisters…

This past weekend was our Sisters weekend in Washington State. Two sisters from Washington State and two sisters from California got together for fun and fellowship. Our sister Vera is in the midst of lots of change in her life so we thought it would be good to be together and celebrate being sisters for a weekend.

We started the weekend off with a Raclette meal together on Friday evening. The weather forecast for the weekend was dismal but on Saturday morning we were giddy because the sun was shining and it promised to be a day without rain. We headed north on Interstate 5 to Mount Vernon, Washington to see daffodils in bloom. We were blessed with sunshine all day long. We said thank you to God many times during the day. We had a couple of spontaneous stops before we reached our 1st planned stop in Mount Vernon, Roozengaarde, to muck about in the daffodil fields.

This is the entrance to a beautiful garden at Roozengaarde. Forsythia acts as a natural fence on this side of the tailored garden at Roozengaarde. Soon this garden will be in full bloom with tulips like this photo below from last year.

The sea of yellow in the background are the rows and rows of daffodils.

Besides these signs and fences here is another teaser shot of the fields of daffodils with a fence in the background.

My sisters, Kathy, Lana and Vera.

I’m linking up to signs, signs hosted by Lesley and Good Fences hosted by TexWisGirl.

Today is my recuperating day after all the fun I had with my sisters. Part of recuperating will be getting back on my daily track. Hope your day is going well.

A Sneak Peek…

…into part of our sisters weekend. I’ll share more later because we’re still cracking each other up…

My prayers were answered for a nice day on Saturday for our major tour day! Thank you Lord!

I’ll be back in my blogging saddle on Wednesday!

Lunch in La Conner and Tulips!

This post is mostly about tulips and daffodils but we ladies (Mennonite Girls Can Cook) did enjoy lunch in La Conner after we tiptoed through the tulips and daffodils. So I’m linking to ABC Wednesday for L is for Lunch with the ladies in La Conner! Thank you to Mrs. Nesbitt and the ABC team!

Seven out of ten of the girls were able to meet up for a few hours in the Skagit Valley of Washington State. Six of the girls had to cross the border from Canada into Washington State. I live in Washington State so I just drove North for a little over an hour to meet up.

You can call these rows of tulips but since we are on the letter L we can call them lines of tulips.

When us girls are together there are lots of photos taken.

Such lovely landscapes!

You can look at lots of varieties of tulips at the gardens open to the public like Roozengaarde and Tulip World.

Other flowers besides tulips are planted in the gardens. These lavender colored hyacinth blooms are so pretty paired with yellow blooms.

We love each other and laugh a lot when we get together.

I’ll add my Bible verse for the letter L…

You will encounter lots of mud if you want to walk out to the fields of tulips or daffodils so mud boots are a good idea to lug with you and make sure you bring a plastic bag to put them in when you are done and put your clean shoes on.

It really is amazing to have this area in Washington State to enjoy and to rival the tulip production of Holland.

Barns, Daffodils and Tulips!

A little road trip to meet up with my girlfriends from Canada to see the tulips and daffodil fields in Mount Vernon yielded an added photo op with barns in the distance, emphasis on in the distance. I’m linking up to the Barn Collective #25 at Rose Street Reflections. Thank you Amy!

Hope you didn’t have to squint too hard to spot the barns! Next time I’ll show the ones I got closer to without any flowers in the foreground!

Have a wonderful Easter Week everyone!

God Loves Me…

It’s good for me to look at all the ways God loves me and blesses me week in and week out. This past week my cup overflowed. Here are five things that filled my cup this week…

Living in the Seattle area with all it has to offer including a wonderful ferry system to take us away to new places to explore.

Comfortable spaces to stay that I don’t take for granted.

Good food and drink plopped in front of me is always a treat!

God’s creation in a beautiful setting to explore and marvel at. I will share a post from the Bloedel Reserve soon.

My cup was full from a wonderful weekend getaway with Dear and then on Monday I met up with 6 of the Mennonite Girls Can Cook at the Tulip fields with a nice lunch afterwards. Now my cup was overflowing. I will share more photos from the tulip fields later.

I said I had my Friday’s Fave Five that I’m linking up with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story with but I’d like to add one more blessing from afar.

My father, Moisi or Moses has re-discovered his love for jig-saw puzzles and it’s nice for him to be able to enjoy this activity. For those of you that have been following my updates on my pop, he is now living with my oldest sister and her husband. They are taking very good care of him and his loneliness has lessened. He is eating a whole lot better, too, thanks to my wonderful sister.

As you look back over this past week what do you count as blessings?

Time to Pack it Up…

…this will be my last tulip field post for now. It’s time to pack and head south.

I’m always on the lookout for the odd one in the bunch…

I was so happy that I was prompted to stash my yard boots in the car before I headed to the fields because…

…here’s what I got to walk through to get to all the different colored rows of tulips!

Yes, I felt quite smug! I’ll admit it…

If you didn’t have boots on the Roozengaarde Garden was a good choice to see many beautiful varieties of tulips and to be able to buy bunches of tulips, too.

Packed fresh and ready to send to the stands to sell.

I managed to take the garden shots avoiding hundreds of people that were milling about. The later in the morning the worse it gets.

Tuesday will be my day to get everything organized at this old house for my absence. I will be packing the suitcases for a very early departure on Wednesday morning. Dear will be coming later in the week.

Mixing It Up!

Hope you aren’t tired of tulips! Today I’m sharing the variegated and mixed up tulips. We have had rain, rain and more rain this weekend. Finally on Sunday afternoon we got some blue skies and sunshine!

We had some fun news this weekend. Our nephew Caleb asked his sweetheart Marie to marry him. Looks like our family will be having another wedding celebration come August! Reasons to celebrate are the theme of this year!

A friend of Caleb and Marie was hiding out to take this photo and others of this fun moment.

Congratulations on your engagement Caleb and Marie!

Anything new in your neck of the woods?

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Tag Archives: Roozengaarde