Tulip Festival, Iowa

People in Dutch Flavour

 Want to see something old from a new glass, Orange City Iowa is the place for you. It hosts Tulip Festival yearly to celebrate the Dutch Heritage. This year they celebrated the 75^th Anniversary and I was fortunate to spot the event. I had to convince my friends to come to the agreement that it is going to be a good show and believe me it was aaaawesome.

Best Pic

Tulip Festival’s main attraction besides variety of Tulips is the Parade. There are 2 parades in the festival, 1^st in afternoon and 2^nd in eve. We started a bit late Saturday morning and hence we were not able to see the 1^st but the 2^nd one. As soon as we reached there, we had subway (Note: wherever you go in US, there are few restaurants like Subway, Pizza hut, Chipotle where you can get affordable veg. So you may want to look for them, if you don’t find good local veggie). So we waited for the parade and before that enjoyed the puppet show, horse ride-a tour of downtown and entertainment on road.

Tulips Close up

The most important part of the festival was that the whole town was submerged in Dutch color, everyone and everywhere, we can find people roaming in Dutch dresses. They look pretty cool hence I clicked couple with them. Not only the dresses but the shoes too were unique. Wooden shoes are typical Dutch heritage. They were useful in wet soil in Netherlands from where the Dutch people came.

Parade Snap

Finally the time came for the evening parade for which we travelled around 3 hours. All the way from Minnesota to Iowa. It consisted of bands from different schools, but exactly same format. Every group consisted of a banner in starting showing the name of group followed by 3 persons facing towards the band, giving them directions, followed by around 5-6 rows of different instruments and last instrument will be flute. Then there were King and Queen of festival, antique cars, bike gang, tractors and many more.

Lots of Tulips

Overall parade experience was really cool. After completing the parade, we tried to have coffee in the old wooden shoe factory (now a coffee shop), unfortunately it was closed. Anyways we stopped for some food on the way and finally made it to our place on time.

Know more @ http://octulipfestival.com/