Tulip Time Festival: Holland Michigan

As I mentioned last week, the first week in May was a special time for @mrsbozz and I. We were able to mark a couple things off her bucket list. The main reason we headed over to Grand Rapids, Michigan was for the lantern festival at the John Ball Zoo, but I figured since we were only about 30 minutes from Holland, why not check out the tulip festival as well.

We got up early on Saturday morning and grabbed some breakfast then hopped in the car to head down/over to Holland. Even though we got into town around 9 AM, I was pretty surprised to find that the parking lot at Windmill Island Gardens was already full. While there are plenty of other places to see tulips in town, this is one of the key attractions.

Given it was the first full day of the tulip time festival, I knew things were going to be pretty busy, but I didn't have a clue they would be quite this busy. We drove through town a bit and found a parking spot about a mile and a half from where we need to ultimately be. We started following the masses towards the "island", and passed many small batches of tulips like you see in the photos above.

At one point in the downtown area along the waterfront was passed this sign that gave a run down of how the festival started. Basically, back in 1927 Lida Rogers was a Biology teacher at the local high school, and thought they needed to beautify the town a bit. One of her ideas was to plant tulips in every yard like the Dutch do/did and thus the legacy was born.

As we continued our walk, we could eventually see our destination off in the distance. It felt like it was so far away, but it really didn't take us that long to walk there. There was a shuttle bus that took you the last half mile to the park, but it was such a beautiful (if not slightly chilly) day that we decided to just walk. There actually so many people walking along the path that they were spread across both sides of the road.

Eventually we made it to the park and after paying our $20 per person fee to get in, we were ready to see some more tulips. There actually isn't a ton to the park itself, they have a small village set up with different vendors, they also have an area where you can buy your own tulip bulbs to plant at home. Finally, they also have a small street organ and of course the star attraction of the park which is the Dutch Windmill.

Just to give you some background from their site, the city of Holland, MI was founded in 1847 by Dutch settlers who were just the first of many to call the west side of Michigan home. After Lida made the recommendation in 1927 to beautify the town, the first Tulip Time festival was hosted in 1929.

In 1961, the idea was first brought up to procure a authentic Dutch windmill. It wasn't until 1964 that the windmill "de Zwaan" was moved to the United States piece by piece. I think I also read somewhere it was the last Dutch windmill to ever be removed from their country. I could be wrong though.

The windmill is fully operational and they still use it to grind wheat into flour that you can buy small packages of at the farm. As you can see from the photos, you can also go to the upper level of the windmill, but it looked pretty crowded, so we skipped that part.

Later in the morning we visited a few used book stores and we got talking to one of the owners about why we were in town. We mentioned that we came for the tulip festival and she said that unfortunately this year they peaked about two weeks prior to our visit. Which is kind of funny since the Tulip Time Festival was just starting that day, but I guess it is futile to try and guess when Mother Nature is going to show up.

You could tell that some of the flowers were in pretty rough shape. I thought it was due to the frost that had happened the night before, but it made more sense when the shop owner mentioned they had already peaked. Despite that, we still got to see some nice color and I can see how pretty it must be when they are at prime bloom. If anything, I thought the farm was a bit smaller than I expected. I think there are still something like half a million or more tulips planted here. I was reading there are some other places in or near town where they have millions of tulips planted.

In addition to the windmill and the small village there is also the Street Organ I think I mentioned earlier. It was playing a traditional tune and was pretty cool to see in action. I took a photo of it above. There is also a carousel that we didn't see. It was purchased from Groningen in 1971 and brought over. Also apparently in 2013 they discovered some structural issues with the windmill, so they did a multi-million dollar restoration project.

The weather was still beautiful, so we decided to just walk all the way back to our car. About halfway back we came across some food trucks, so we decided to share a funnel cake. We only ate about half of it then we threw the rest away. It was delicious though! Once we got back to our car, we did a bit more things in the Holland Michigan area, but I will save that for another post!

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