Justin Visit

The plan was to meet Justin at the Ihop restaurant in Marysville yesterday at 10 AM. Kristine and Harmony were driving up from Lakewood with Kristine’s friend, Fewcher. Justin didn’t live far from the restaurant so he had Kristine text him when she arrived at the restaurant which was about 10:15. Justin has grown so much since we last saw him and we took this shot of him with Harmony:

 

Following breakfast, we all went for a ride north to the tulip fields and to our fifth wheel. None of them – Fewcher, Kristine, Justin or Harmony – have ever seen the tulip fields before so it was a real treat for them. It was a very cool and windy morning but at least it wasn’t raining. There were mobs of people at the fields as the weekend - plus winding down the Tulip Festival - attracted many last minute visitors to the area. Of course, we took lots of pictures, some of which are below. Starting with this one of Kristine, Harmony and Justin:

 

This great shot of Kristine:

 

And this one with the whole group:

 

Here is one of Grandma with Justin:

 

And we took some of the tulip fields, of course:

 

Finally, we had a very nice visit at the fifth wheel in La Conner and we took a stroll along the Skagit Bay that the campground borders:

 

The visit with Justin was a great day for us and we’re sure it was also a treat for Kristine and Harmony. Justin has grown into a wonderful young man as he completes his sophomore year in high school. They all left our rig at 3 PM to drop Justin back at the restaurant and to head home.

Today is moving day for us as we pack up to move to Fall City, WA to the Tall Chief Campground and, hopefully, a much more complete site as far as the amenities. I will post this entry at the family lodge here before we leave which is targeted for 10 AM…

 

Researching Options

The inconvenience of not having Wi-Fi, 50 amp service and no sewer hookup has caused us to lose patience with this campground. We cannot even get a cell signal to use our phones without going to the family lodge. Now that we have seen everything that we came to this area to see, we are looking for other options for our remainder of the WA time. We spent several hours at the lodge with our computers and Josie did laundry there while we researched other options and used our phones to make calls.

There aren’t many options for Thousand Trails campgrounds in the area so we checked out many other public campgrounds. We settled on moving to an Encore campground (Tall Chief) in Fall City, WA. Encore is affiliated with Thousand Trails and we get a big discount at those campgrounds. It costs us money, but none of the inconveniences are there. It also brings us closer to Kristine’s home and has storage capability for when we go to Patty’s for a week at the end of the month. We will make the move tomorrow (Sunday) and, hopefully, it will be our last move while in WA.

We finalized our planned visit with Justin yesterday. Kristine has arranged for all of us to meet at the Ihop restaurant in Marysville at 10 AM this morning. Marysville is where Justin lives and is about 45 minutes from our present location. It is between Kristine’s home and us so it means that she doesn’t have to travel so far to meet all of us.

The location of our new campground is very close to the area we lived in Woodinville, WA. So we may get the opportunity to visit our old neighborhood while there next week. It would be interesting to see all the changes in Lake Tuck which was one of our favorite homes that we had over the years…

Burlington, WA

There are two towns that are just about 12 or so miles north and east of La Conner – Burlington and Mt Vernon. We were told that Burlington has all the big box stores so we wanted to check out the town and see how it compared to other towns in the area. We were also told that the nearest Costco was there so that was our initial destination. That was easy to locate – right off of I-5 in Burlington. The main thing we were after at Costco was some fresh strawberries and we found those. Burlington also has an Outlet Mall so we drove around that to check out the stores in that Mall. There is also another Mall with all the stores you would expect – Macy’s, JC Penney, Sears, etc. – not more than a half mile from the Outlets so Burlington is definitely the place to go if you want to shop in this area.

Since it was raining almost the entire day, there wasn’t much else to do except go back to the rig and hang out. We spent time at the Family Lodge where the Wi-Fi is located and Josie did some exercises in the fitness room while I did my usual computer stuff. We took a drive across the street to check out the storage area where we have a reservation to keep our fifth wheel for the week we will be back east to visit Patty and the kids the first week in May. That is a very inexpensive solution for our fifth wheel while we are gone – it will only cost $12.95 for the week. The fact that we will also have to store the truck with the rig results in another charge, but it is still the best deal in town. Even though it is the best deal around, we are considering other options since the inconveniences at this place are beginning to wear us down. There must be a better solution  than this one for the rest of our time in WA. We'll see.

We’ll take our usual morning trip to the Family lodge so I can post this entry and Josie will do some laundry. Maybe we both will get to exercise today in the fitness room. It makes a difference for us when we exercise so we like to try and get that done whenever we can. No trips are planned except we will select our site for storing the fifth wheel today and have all that paperwork completed for our transfer into storage - if we decide to go that route. We are also trying to finalize our plans for the weekend which include a visit with our other grandson, Justin, on Saturday. He is living in Marysville which is only a short trip down I-5. We are looking forward to that visit…

 

Downtown La Conner

The activity for yesterday was to walk around the town of La Conner. It is a quaint little town filled with antique shops, restaurants and curio shops. Once again, it brought back the memories we had of the last time we walked through town about 17 years ago. The town is noted – aside from its proximity to the Tulip fields – for being a popular tourist destination during the Tulip Festival and all summer long. The main landmark is the Rainbow Bridge on the south end of town and the route we take from the Thousand Trails preserve to town:

 

We parked at the edge of town and took this shot of the popular downtown area:

 

The shops along one side of the street all back up to the Swinomish Channel. Here, you can see the Rainbow Bridge and the small harbor from the small alcoves between the shops along 1^st St:

 

Most of the town was just as we remembered except for the normal changes in businesses along the street. One of the stops we had to make was at the La Conner Post Office on this street to pick up our mail which we had sent to General Delivery. Our mail was there as we had hoped and our final paychecks from Spring Training were inside which made us happy.

We then went to Anacortes which is about 12 miles from La Conner to stop at the Safeway store and drive around the area to see the homes and get information on that town. Anacortes is where you catch the Ferries to the San Juan Islands and to Victoria, B.C. We have also taken those trips on a few occasions and is another reason we like this area so much.

Between Anacortes and La Conner there is an Indian Reservation- Swinomish Tribe – that contains…. a Casino! Of course we had to stop and check that out. We picked up club cards there to add to our massive collection of club cards from casinos all over the country and played for a short time before heading back to our rig. We only played a small stake since we didn’t care much for the slots in this casino. We didn’t win, but we also didn’t play that much.

We had our “honey wagon” visit yesterday morning so our holding tanks are on empty once again for the next week. Our schedule today will probably include a visit to the other nearby towns of Mt Vernon and Burlington which are about 15 miles from La Conner. Those towns contain all the big name stores like Costco and the Malls. The rain has returned so we are glad that we did our outside activities the last two days. I believe the forecast is for this rain to stay around for at least the next couple days…

 

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

The sun was shining brightly and there were just a few clouds in the sky. With the temperature in the low 50’s, it was a perfect day to tour the tulip fields for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival held here each year in the month of April.

There is a route throughout the Skagit Valley, marked with signs, that takes you by all the tulip fields. The main attraction is the nearly 1000 acres that is owned by the Roozen family that owns the majority of the bulb producing acreage in the valley. The company – Washington Bulb Co. – was formed by the father six decades ago and is now run by his sons, the five Roozen brothers. It is a fascinating story and the family has done a wonderful job presenting the bulb producing capabilities of their properties.

We took over 75 pictures and it was difficult selecting the ones to place in this entry. I decided to break it down into three sections – the fields, the harvesting and the gardens.

 Starting with these shots of the tulip fields that we passed along the route and that were part of the Roozen farms:

 

 

And this one of Josie standing at the edge of one of the fields to show how high these tulips grow:

 

 

There were employees working in this field that were picking and packaging “tight” tulips in bundles of 10 for sale in the gift shop and the various flower kiosks on the grounds of the company:

 

And this shot that shows how they clip off the tulip tops before harvesting the bulbs:

 

After touring the fields we went into the Roozen Gaarde Gardens, where there were tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, muscari and a few other flower types. These gardens are planted from scratch each year:

 

Finally, here are a couple shots of the daffodils that were also still growing in some of the fields:

 

We grabbed a bite to eat at the garden snack bar and then spent some time walking through the onsite gift shop. It has been (probably) 17 years or so since we last came to this Festival. There have been many changes and we can see where the gardens and the whole Roozen operation has expanded over the years. This area was selected because the topsoil and climate closely resemble the environment in Holland where it all started with this family.

Today we will make a visit to downtown La Conner which is a great compliment to the Festival and the area. We hope to have some pictures from our day in town today…

 

Settled in La Conner

Our relocation from Puyallup to La Conner went off without a problem. We left on time at 9:30 and arrived right at noon to register and select a site at the Thousand Trails preserve. It was a very nostalgic drive while passing through Bellevue on I-405 as I recalled nearly 20 years of working in that particular area of WA. It has changed dramatically as I watched the very first high rise being constructed in that town back in 1980. It now has at least 10-12 high rise buildings – at least, that I could see from the freeway. I still noticed the two story building where my corner office was located is still standing.

 The entire drive was a pretty one and we only passed through a couple occasional showers and the skies were starting to clear for the first time since we arrived on April 5. As we got closer to La Conner, we could see the tulip fields in all their glory:

 

It will be exciting to take the tulip fields tour that we have missed for over 15 years now.

We selected our site from among the 10 or so that would allow satellite reception from a rooftop dish. There are a couple hundred sites here, but they are mostly in the woods with lots and lots of trees. It isn’t the nicest site by any means, but is convenient to the lodge and the beaches along the Skagit Bay:

 

 There are some problems with our site. First of all, it is has only 30 amps of electricity which will limit our concurrent use of some appliances. Secondly, it has no sewer hookup so we will have to utilize their “honey wagon” service for emptying our holding tanks while we are here. The last problem, and perhaps the most important one, is that there is no Wi-Fi capability as a result of the low lying campground and the distance from us of the nearest Verizon tower. We drove into Anacortes (about 10 miles) which has the nearest Radio Shack to look for a booster antenna for the data card we use for Internet. They had a solution, but it cost $100 for the device which we would only have occasional use for, so we passed on that and will just go to the family lodge to use the Internet. It is a real inconvenience and has soured us somewhat on the Thousand Trails preserves which have let us down on the last two stays – Chehalis and here. I went to the lodge last night to try out the reception and couldn’t get a signal until I tried while parked in our car outside the lodge. I’m not sure if we will be able to stick it out for the two weeks we have scheduled here so don’t be surprised if we move to another campground in the area where the services are more convenient.

 All was well until 8:30 PM last night when our power went out at the pedestal where we plug in our power cord. I was unable to reset the breaker and had to connect our power to the adjacent site until I can get some service done on ours this morning. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got though, and look forward to visiting this nice area of WA…

 

Harmony Visit

We had Harmony for the night on Saturday and we had plans to take her shopping for shoes and to see the daffodils in Sumner yesterday. It was a very happy time for all of us while visiting and we went shopping for new tennis shoes for her in the morning. Kristine wanted her to have white tennis shoes for school and we never realized how difficult it is to find white tennis shoes. It seems like the wild and psychedelic colors have taken over the tennis shoe market as we had to go to several different stores to find them. We ended up at the South Hill Mall in Puyallup before we located a store that had the right pair for her.

There has been lots of talk and many comments made about the daffodil fields in Sumner. We had an address for them and took a drive to the location and found this area, of about 20 acres (maybe) of daffodils that were either almost done blooming, or not ready to bloom. It was hard to tell:

 



 The only access to these flowers was down a muddy side road and the only good part about it was that it was not raining while we were there. It was not anything like the Skagit Valley area where the tulips and daffodils are so plentiful and beautiful that we are going to visit this week while in La Conner.

We spent some more time back at the rig before packing Harmony's things up and heading to Kristine's for the rest of the afternoon. We spent time with her and her family and even had a short birthday party to celebrate her birthday which is Wednesday the 17th. We called it a day and headed back to our fifth wheel at around 6 PM.

What a surprise we had when we arrived back at the fifth wheel. It had obviously stormed while we were gone and there was either hail or snow - or both - that created a winter scene when we returned:



It didn't do anything but rain up until now and we are wondering if maybe the weather isn't done treating us to more of this white stuff. We can remember many April's when we lived here where there were snow storms that came through to remind us that winter is not yet over in this part of the country. We're keeping our fingers crossed for La Conner.

Our departure today is planned for around 9:30 AM which will get us to La Conner around noon after traveling the approximately 110 miles to the preserve. We will again get together with Kristine and Harmony next weekend when we have a planned visit with Justin in Marysville. The details for that visit still need to be finalized but we are looking forward to seeing him again...