While in Mount Vernon we visited “Tulip Town”.  This is the commercial wing of a huge farm that owns acres of land and is one of the largest tulip farms in the country.  Tulip Town is a pretty cool place to visit, they have fields of tulips you can walk around, tractor trolley rides for the kids, kite flying demonstrations an art and flower shop and cafeteria.

The farm is owned by the De Goede family who came from Holland and moved to the states in the 1950’s and settled in Skagit Valley and started farming flowers.

Obviously when I was there they didn’t have any tulips!  Well it’s me and I’m just not that lucky.  They hadn’t come through yet so I had to find something else to shoot.  Actually that’s not completely true.  They had about 8 rows of tulips that had come into bloom, but every man and his dog was standing round them taking pictures.  I tried but just couldn’t get close enough to get any good shots!

There are signs everywhere saying don’t walk down the flower lanes, just stand at the end of the rows.  But of course it’s chaos there nobody seems to follow the instructions and there were people stomping all over the flowers!

There were a couple of cool buildings to shoot, one was a huge windmill (I’ll post a picture of that someday) and the other was this cool wooden hut with a water wheel.  I liked that more as it didn’t have loads of people round it, so I took some shots and the one I liked best I’m posting tonight.  It had a little garden around the hut with some of their tulips growing in it.  I thought it looked cool.

After a busy day at work with lots of meetings, Master Chief and Carter decided to go out and climb some trees.  So they did!

While in Mount Vernon over the weekend we went to visit Rosario Beach.  This is a small beach on what I think is a Native American reservation on the island of Fidalgo.  Today’s photograph was taken on the top of a peninsular overlooking Puget Sound.  I was taking some pictures looking out over the water and while the images were nice, they didn’t really grab me.

Then I saw this really cool tree.  It’s branches were kind of messed up and it looked sort of creepy and lent itself really well to a black and white image.  I got down low so the tree was above me and the sea was hidden over the hill and took the shot.

At the top of the hill there were a number of people just sitting on the grass looking out to sea.  Some people were talking, others were just lying there relaxing enjoying the sun.  It seemed that the nice weather really brought out the locals.  While this was nice it was quite hard to take a picture without people being in it.  In fact in the image below there were two guys sitting right at the top of the hill to the left of the tree.  As a result I removed them in Photoshop – cool eh?

Anyway I had a black and white image in mind when I took this and think it came out well.

For the last 100 days the Halo guys have been stuck in the house.  Sure they went out to play in the snow but they haven’t really left home!  So for the next 100 days they have decided to come to work with me and see what they can get up to.  Today Master Chief found a flower for Carter.  Not sure he really wanted it though.

Ok, so I told you that I went to Mount Vernon, and I also told you that there were no tulips, but if you remember I said that there were some daffodils.  Now the term “some” here is probably not strong enough to describe exactly how many daffodils were there but hopefully tonight’s picture gives you an idea.

As you drive around the valley, you see a number of fields like this, they are just completely covered in yellow flowers.  With a blue sky above it really is quite something, throw in some fluffy white clouds and mountains in the background and the scene becomes truly amazing.  Imagine what this looks like when you have fields and fields of colored tulips – that’s why I’m going back!

So I think I mentioned before that these were my mum’s favorite flowers, so mum, this one is for you.  I think she would have liked to see this.

Today is actually a special posting as it’s my 100th picture of the year (actually it’s 200 if you count the stupid ones I do with the Halo dudes).  I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I would get this far, but it just goes to show that anything is possible.  (Just got to do this 2.5 more times and I can give up photography for ever).

If you ask James and Abi they will tell you that there are somethings you just have to learn how to do if you are going to live in the Seeley household.  One of the most important, is learn how to make a good cup of tea.  We may now all be American, but I’ll never give up my PG Tips tea.  The Halo guys have been living here long enough now that it’s time for that right of passage, time to learn the art of tea making.

As you know (if you read this site) yesterday I went to Mount Vernon to the annual Skagit County Tulip Festival.  If you read yesterday’s posting you will also know that unfortunately the tulips hadn’t bloomed yet so I had to shoot other subjects instead.

The first place we visited was Roozengaarde which have nice manicured gardens you can walk around.  Now in Roozengaarde they actually did have a lot of flowers, some of which were tulips and I took (as you’d expect) a lot of pictures – I’m sure you’ll see many of these soon.  The gardens are broken up in to different areas by fences and flower beds and on one of the fences there were a number of decorative metal sculptures.  They have clearly been there a while as some were pretty rusty but with the sun shining I thought they looked great, so out came the camera and tripod and I grabbed some shots.

Today’s image was of one of the fence decorations, this red metal flower was right at the end of the fence and looked great against a predominantly green background.  I tried waiting until nobody was behind before I took the shot but the best I could do was one guy behind a bush, behind the flower.  So I reduced the depth of field (amount of picture that was in focus) and got the image below.

It was a lovely day and Roozengaarde is well worth a visit.

Carter was especially happy today as the Easter Bunny visited with some chocolate goodness!

Today was a really good day.  I woke up this morning at 7am and drove to Lynnwood where I met with a Shutter Tour bus.  Shutter Tours are a tour company that target photographers and take you to places of interest in the area and provide guidance on capturing great pictures.

The guy who runs the company (Terry) was there to meet us and off we went to the Skagit County Tulip Festival.  Initially there were four of us on the bus, but we had to drive to Stanwood to pick up two more people.  Once we collected everyone we went on to Roozengaarde where they have a garden (big surprise) full of flowers.  When we arrived the sun was shinning and it was really warm, fortunately we were there early enough before the majority of tourists turned up so we could take pictures without lots of people in the way.  Having said that I was repeatedly asked to take pictures of couples with their own camera – kind-a hard to say no when they ask nice!

After Roozengaarde we moved on to Tulip City and then La Conner for lunch.  This small town was the location where I found the old Chevy below.  We were walking through the town and I saw this car and had to take a picture.  I love these classics and thought it looked fantastic.  But hang on I hear you ask, why are you posting a picture of a car when you went to a tulip festival?

Well, I booked this tour over a month ago, and the festival started back at the beginning of the April.  I figured by the second weekend in April the tulips will definitely be in bloom.  Well I was wrong.  Apparently the really cold rain we have been having here recently had set the tulips back a week or two.  So all we saw were a load of green stalks.  Actually I’m being a little unfair, there were some tulips but not the number we were expecting.  Basically Mother Nature did a number on us and we made the best of a bad situation.  Hence the Chevy below.

I felt a bit sorry for the tour company as they were trying really hard to find great locations for us to shoot, and the primary reason for being there (the tulips) hadn’t come through yet.  But at the end of the day there’s nothing you can do about that we we pressed on.  Incidentally if anyone is in the area and want to use Shutter Tours here is a link to their site – I really recommend using them: http://www.shuttertours.com/.

Having said all this I had a great time.  The tour company was really good and took us to Rosario Beach where I got some really great shots and then onto some daffodil fields for some more great pictures.  We even had time to fit in a visit to the Tulip Valley Winery and Snowgoose Produce where they sell the biggest ice creams cones I have ever seen!  By the time I got home I was exhausted – had a little sun burn (how funny is that) and had loads of pictures from the day that I’ll be posting in the days / weeks to come.

I’ll wait a week or two and then head back to Skagit with the family and shoot those tulips, until then you will have to make do with cars, beaches and daffodils.

I think Carter and the other guys think that “sack racing” is an Olympic event!  Well Carter tried too hard I think, look at his feet, he’s a sack race cheater.