While red is the predominant color, tulips can be seen in a wide variety of shapes, heights, and colors, except pure blue. The classification of tulips is based on the timing of their blooms, either early, mid, or late-season, anywhere from March to May. Once in bloom, tulips have a life span of three to seven days.

Tulips are most widely associated with The Netherlands, which has the world’s largest permanent display. The popularity of the tulip back in the 1600’s created a “tulip mania,” where the value of the tulip was so expensive, that it actually became a form of currency.

The colors of tulips have symbolism. Yellow can represent cheerful thoughts and friendship; white can signify forgiveness; purple can symbolize royalty; pink for perfect happiness and care. Red is for perfect love.

Tulip festivals happen around the world. This past weekend we went to the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, about an hour’s north of Seattle. Fields and fields and fields of colorful tulips in bloom. I was walking through a rainbow of tulips. While I tiptoed, I photographed and played with the settings on my camera. Landscape mode and foliage mode; color swap and color accent modes; and even a fish-eye effect.

Here’s to perfect love…

Sweet Travels!

Information on tulips from:
http://www.tulipfestival.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip
http://www.theflowerexpert.com/content/aboutflowers/exoticflowers/tulips
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/facts-about-tulips.html
http://www.teleflora.com/tulips/flowers-plants/tulip-detail.asp
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/tulips-meaning.html

I thought I would travel from my “Excerpts of Europe” blogs to a series of blogs about Vietnam. Unlike the Europe blogs, which were based on my journal writings, these Vietnam blogs will be based on photos I took. I shall start with the children.

These two little girls in their colorful clothes seemed to pose like models.

This group of children was enjoying playing a game of pool.

A water buffalo carried these two children through the fields.

And this little girl was having fun climbing in a tree.

More children of Vietnam photos in my next blog.

Sweet Travels!

Then there are other necessities: water purification system and emergency shelter. repair kits and insect repellant. signaling devices and sleeping bags.

Of course, there are your hiking boots and tent. And rain gear and even toilet paper.

During my recent backpacking trip of “the other two-thirds” of the Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier, I had all of the above items…and then some…

In the pockets of my zip-type-convertible-pants-into-shorts, I carried three of my own “essentials.” The right pocket contained my all-important camera. It lived there the entire trip. An awesome new compact digital camera with 14.1 mega pixels and 14x optical zoom. With this camera, I took well over 1,000 photos of the fabulous scenery!

My left pocket contained my SPF 30 chapstick. Definitely well used because we were truly blessed with sunny and quite warm weather most of the days we were out there.

And then for the first four days, my left pocket also carried a bug net to pull over my head. In addition to insect repellant, I wore the bug net at times for extra protection.

Fortunately, the bugs eventually went away, so I was left with my two essentials in my pockets, which then sometimes also contained other various items as the days went on.

We had an awesome backpacking trip this year. Very, very little rain, warm sunny days, and even mostly warm nights. We met some interesting people, saw some wildlife, the wildflowers in many places were still in bloom, and Mt. Rainier itself was visible every day.

The pictures in this blog were while sitting in a flower-filled area called Spray Park. The first picture is as it was – a “normal’ picture. For the second and third pictures, I was playing with a settings on my camera. First, there was a “color swap” button, where the camera chooses particular colors to change. And second, “color accent,” where the camera selects one color (green, in this case), and then makes everything else black and white. And the last picture, another “normal” picture, was one of the very few times on the entire trip where a light cloud cover blew in and completely blocked out Mt. Rainier (but only momentarily).

The 10 essentials are certainly very important while out in the wilderness, but so are some personal items that one finds necessary and quite useful to take along.

Stay tuned for more blogs on my Wonderland Trail backpacking trip.

Sweet Travels!