Visiting The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

If you've never had the opportunity to visit Western Washington's spring tulip festival then let me just say you are missing out on one of the most brilliant displays of natural beauty ever. This was made abundantly clear to Ryan and I when we finally drove up north to visit the festival for the first time a couple weeks ago. Not only did we catch many of the tulips in peak bloom, but we were also graced with amazing weather, a phenomenon that can be incredibly rare during April in the Pacific Northwest. Skagit Valley lies only about an hour or two north of Seattle (depending on traffic), although the myriad license plates we saw in the nearby town of Mount Vernon indicate that people definitely travel from much further away.

There are multiple locations to enjoy the festival from. Typing "Skagit Valley Tulip Festival" into Google Maps will deposit you at the street fair and farmer's market going on in downtown Mount Vernon. Depending on how long you've been on the road this might be a good opportunity to make a pit stop for food and/or restroom breaks. I highly recommend stopping in at the Skagit River Brewery either on your way in or on your way back from frolicking merrily through the tulips. The restaurant itself is on the smaller side and you'll likely find yourself waiting awhile for a table on a busy festival weekend, but the house-made beer and delicious food coupled with the restaurant's cute rustic vibe is totally worth the wait! They also have a dog-friendly outdoor patio.

Once you're ready to leave downtown Mount Vernon behind, you have two main options of where to go to soak in those beautiful tulip fields. The first, and slightly closer, option is a quaint Dutch-style farm called Roozengaarde. This is the field that we decided to visit, and while it's technically only about a mile or two outside the city center, be prepared for a fair amount of stop-and-go traffic congestion along the countryside's narrow one-lane roads. The second option is another bulb farm called Tulip Town. If you go on a weekday you could likely hit both farms, but on a busy (and sunny) weekend like the one we encountered you'll likely have to settle for one or the other as lines to get into the parking lot and then lines to get into the actual farm are incredibly long. Next time we go we will definitely try to give Tulip Town a go!

All in all, the experience is definitely worth a day trip! You'll encounter fields full of flowers as far as the eye can see and lots of great photo opportunities. We visited in mid-April, but peak bloom for the tulips can vary from year to year depending on weather conditions so keep an eye on the tulip festival's bloom map online as well as on Instagram to get a sense of when the fields are really in full bloom! The festival typically runs from the end of March through the end of April although some flowers might still be in bloom through the beginning of May. You can check out some of my photos from the trip below.