Everyone knows about the Skagit Valley's tulips. They arrive in spring after the swans and snow geese have departed. This year's Skagit Valley Tulip Festival starts April 1 and runs the whole month (info: www.tulipfestival.org).
If you haven't been, go. If it's been a while and you think, been there, done that, reconsider. To stand before those geometric patterns of colors blazing surreally against the backdrop of farms and mountains is to feel something like reverence. To avoid the crowds go on a weekday if you can.
And consider folding the tulips into a more ambitious itinerary with Bellingham as your northern turn-around point. Bellingham lies a mere 90 minutes north of Seattle via Interstate 5. It's a three-hour and far-more-interesting drive if you get off I-5 at the Arlington exit and cross over the freeway toward the little farming town of Sylvana. The lifeless efficiency of I-5 quickly fades away as you pass through Sylvana and head up the valley into farm country.
Keep straight as you pass through outer Stanwood onto Pioneer Highway. La Conner and the tulip fields lie 20 minutes ahead. The road, which parallels I-5, brings you to Conway, where you'll turn left for Fir Island and La Conner. This route will take you through more farm country before crossing the Skagit River. These are the fields where the majority of the snow geese and trumpeter and tundra swans take winter break before they pick up and go north.
The tulip fields: Roozengaarde is a bit of a zoo. Try some of the more modest sites - fewer people, more tulips per capita. Tulip trail maps are available on the approaches to the fields or on-line at the web address above.
La Conner, on crowded tulip weekends, can prove untenable; again, weekdays will be more rewarding. Try the Calico Cupboard for lunch.
At the roundabout just east of the center of town head north on La Conner-Whitney Road. Cross Highway 20 and keep going north as the Route becomes Bayview-Edison Road. You'll pass through Bayview - that's Anacortes across the water on your left - and descend into the flats past apple orchards until you reach Samish Island Road. Turn right onto Bayview-Edison Road.
Maybe the hamlet of Edison, founded in the 1850s is the spiritual naval of the Skagit Valley. This is a quiet place (except when the bikers pull in - it's on their route) with two bakeries and a couple of restaurants/taverns and the Edison Eye art gallery, owned by Dana Rust, who lives in back. Rust is a repository of lore about the Northwest masters who came to the valley to paint. Artist Clayton James still lives and paints in these parts. A question about his whereabouts might be answered by the locals with a protective shrug: "He's out painting in the fields."
Famed journalist Edward R. Murrow graduated from Edison High School.
Head out of town on West Bow Hill Road and turn left on Chuckanut Drive. The straight road takes you north through more farms until you ascend to the beauties and sweeping views of Chuckanut, which deposit you in Fairhaven, Bellingham's charming old town and southern gateway. If you leave home by 8 a.m. you should have enough time to explore Bellingham.
I-5 is nearby for a speedy drive home.
Memories of the drive up will go with you: the play of cloud and sunlight over farms and fields, horizons of mountains and sea, the tulips, Edison's timeless quiet, the ascent of Chuckanut.[[In-content Ad]]
