Sunday…Monday Excursions

I thought I’d drop in a new post as I have shamefully neglected any sort of posting in the past few months. But while I was watching TV the other night, I saw that the first episode of the Discovery Channel series on the rebuilding of Greensburg, KS is going to air this Sat. I thought I should post and make you all watch it. So watch!

Sadly I have been off the road for a bit, save for a few weekend excursions and a brief cruise trip to Mexico for my friend’s birthday. But plans for a new trip are in the works to gather more research for Fat Chance. The writing has begun and is going well, but there are holes in the research I gathered last summer. Hmm maybe that’s because I only now fully know what’s going to happen in the story. I need to make a few stops to gather more ideas. To Denver I must go.

But I can’t leave a post without my latest adventure or pictures so… On Monday of this week (after an amazing SCBWI writer’s conference in Bellevue, WA) I went up to the tulip festival, the fields of tulips farmed by the folks north of Seattle. Well the festival officially ended last week, but that didn’t really make me think twice. The first field I came across I was so excited, I pulled over in the trailing splashes of some heavy rain only to sink in two inches of mud. Trying to get close to the field was like high stepping through quicksand.

The closer I got to the fields I saw that there was a tractor out in the middle plowing tulips. Is there anything sadder than a field of stunning flowers that have been beheaded? I’m not kidding. They chop all the petals off and leave the green stalks to die so then the bulbs can be dug up and sold. Look at the troughs of yellow heads.


I began to panic that I was in a race against an agricultural guillotine. I had to see the fields before they were gone. I need not have worried though. They weren’t going to turn away my five bucks at the tourist stops and fields. I was satisfied and got to see the acres of flowers I’d come to see.