Tulip Time Festival

Summer Trip 2

Tulip Time Festival is an annual festival held in Holland, Michigan. Tulip festivals are held in many cities around the United States of America that were founded or largely inhabited by Dutch settlers. It is celebrated every year in mid-May and is currently the largest tulip festival in the United States. Although, we didn’t knew this till now still we planned to visit Holland just to get a taste of something new, to enjoy summer and live life.

I was having discussion with my friends to go someplace where we can enjoy summer and one friend brought up Tulip idea. I have been to a Tulip festival, so I knew it’s not much but again, let’s go out and enjoy. So I started making plan of going there. Soon, we were 5 people all set to go and then it became 7, then final count reached 8. It was right time to book a car. When we were planning the trip some people got to know about our plan and started talking about it. I understood, I can never have a silent anything. If I do something, it will be grand. My Boss also got to know about the trip. Even though, he was going to the same place, he made me carry my laptop with a hotspot so that I can start working even from there in case something falls apart. How workaholic I would look working from there hi hi hi.

We planned everything one day before, which was already late as per my planning. I asked everyone and whoever agreed at that time became part of our plan and whoever denied was out. One of my friend called to confirm in night but by that time, everything was booked and it was difficult to change. Even then I told him, come will adjust, but he was not ready and backed out. Morning, I got ready and got the rental car, it was cool. We thought that will get a 7 seater as per booking but fortunately we got 8 seater Kia Sedona. We were behind schedule at this time. Once we picked up car, we went to our friends place for snacks and then picked up another friend. These people were also not ready which caused more delay. Anyways we started from here and directly stopped at Michigan.

It’s a big festival and hence no parking. Locals opened up their backyard to provide more parking by taking 5 bucks which was pretty interesting. After searching for half an hour, we finally got a place to park. Then we saw the parade which was okay. They had paid sitting, I don’t get that part. Then we moved onto an attraction called as Windmill Island Gardens, a park with Tulip Gardens and a 250 year old windmill. We spent majority of our time here and then we wanted to eat something as we didn’t had lunch yet and it was around 6 P.M. We thought of ordering something, but then we saw a Pizza buffet. Greed of buffet made our trip costly and added more time to our already slow plan. We spent lot of time eating and hence we were not able to see anything afterwards. Then we spent some time chatting outside pizza hut. Afterwards we checked out some shopping places and then some people wanted to spend some more time hanging around and others wanted to head back home. Choice was made by voting. Everyone was tired of taking photographs and walking. Finally we headed towards home around 8:30 P.M. I was home by 1 A.M. This concludes our Tulip Trip.

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/