RV Travels With Huggy

The weather has finally gotten better here in the northwest and I was able to take the top down on my Miata. After getting a mocha today I asked my neighbor to take some photo of me in the car while that top is down. Here is the one I liked best:


Yesterday I went to the tulip fields to visit Tulip Town with my son & his family. Here are some photos from that trip. Mount Vernon, Washington is the biggest supplier of tulip bulbs in the USA and this is one of the two largest farms with over two million bulbs. The flowers are beautiful but the real "crop" is the bulbs that are shipped all over the world. The month of April is the Tulip Festival here and the farms like to always have tulips in bloom during that time, so they stagger their planting to make sure that they bloom over the whole month. Due to that you will see areas in the photos where the blooms have been removed. Here is a general view of some of those fields, with the mountains in the background and kites flying overhead. The mountains show some of the snow that arrived above 1500' over last weekend and had not yet melted as of yesterday:


This another general scene that shows how there are multiple rows with different colors of blooms. This also shows Mount Baker, our NW Washington State volcano, that is about 30 miles away and around 12,000 feet high. It regularly has the most snowfall of all mountains in the northwest and has snow, lots of it, all year:


One of the areas that has already had the blooms stripped is visible in the foreground. Notice how many different colors there are, and this is just a small part of them:


There always seems to be an odd color that manages to slip in & this shows one. There is nothing wrong with this odd tulip but when the blooms have been removed & the bulb dug up, it will look just like the others. Gleaners will move through the fields and remove these odd ones so it will not get mixed in with the intended colored ones:


I like macros so here is one, looking straight down into one of the blooms:


I couldn't resist taking some photos of my grand daughter, K, who to me looks better than any of the flowers:


Tulip Town charges an admission to enter the grounds but they have built up some nice exhibits of things to look at. Here is one of them, with a few tulips in the foreground and a neat barn in the background. The wind had settled down and you can see the kites that earlier were flying now lying on the ground in the middle background:


I wanted to do some playing with Photoshop Elements 4 that I use on my digital images. This is one that I used the watercolor option on. The program has a lot of different "filters" and I guess I need to take the same photo and apply different ones to the same photo, then print them so I can easily see the differences:


I took about a hundred photos there and these just represent some of them. I may use others during slack times, when I haven't done something interesting or exciting to post about. But this is enough photos for one post. If you want to see them in a larger size you can click on one of them and be whisked to my photo site on Flickr. When there you will come in on the photo you clicked on. If you then click on the spot to the right where it says "Dick Phillips' photostream" you will be shown a palate of about ten thumbnail photos I have uploaded. There are other palates at the bottom of the screen to move around, with about ten per selection. I have 182 photos there as of today. Click on one of those photos to bring it up, then click on "All Sizes" at the top of the photo to go to the largest size. I save most of them in 800 by whatever size they turn out to be resulution. Enjoy.