Pella, IA, Tulip Festival
We drove with my dad up to Iowa for a visit with Allison while attending the Pella Tuliptime Festival in Pella, Iowa, which is about an hour south of Grinnell. On the whole, the weekend went well.
The Pella Tuliptime Festival is a worthwhile event to attend even when the tulips have all finished blooming early. The people of Pella, IA, plant 80,000 tulip bulbs every year. They plant different varieties so that there are fresh blooms throughout a 4-week time period. In spite of their efforts to delay the blooms (I read a newspaper article about people spraying the plants with diluted whisky), with this year’s warm weather that time period started in March and ended before the festival. So the colorful blossoms weren’t part of the festival, but the town put on a great Dutch heritage festival. Pella’s been putting this festival on for 77 years. It appears to be a smooth-running operation.
Throughout the 3-day festival, the town hosts 2 parades each day and they are not to be missed! I had read that a highlight was the way the parade is kicked off with street scrubbing. I found that hard to imagine, but I have seen it now and I agree that it’s a highlight. Literally hundreds of people of all ages in Dutch costumes come out and scrub a two-block-long stretch of the street. They all start at one end and work their way up the two blocks. The men and boys each carry two buckets of water on wooden yokes across their shoulders and the women and girls carry brooms. There are a number of antique baby carriages and modern strollers as well. Some filled water troughs are located along the edges of the street so the buckets can be refilled. Not square inch of pavement is left dry. The scrubbers keep coming and coming and coming and sweeping and sweeping. It’s impressive!
The parade had great floats, several bands from area middle and high schools, shiny tractors (including a lavender one driven by a woman), unusual bicycles, cub scout troops, and, towards the end, some not-so-Dutch groups like a Karate club and Scottish bagpipers. If you’ve never seen a band marching in red, wooden shoes, you need to go!
There’s a historic village with costumed guides demonstrating old-time crafts. The village includes a 10-year-old working windmill. We bought bread baked with the grain that was milled there. The village has a bakery in which they sell specialties known as “Dutch letters”, a pastry in an “S” shape that has an almond paste filling, and hand out samples of poffertjes, a variation of a pancake that is shaped more like a mini-muffin.
An unexpected highlight for us in the village was walking through Wyatt Erp’s childhood home and running into cousins Jamie and Carol and their spouses, who had also come up from St. Louis for the Tulipfest! We ran into them a couple more times that day and arranged to meet and visit with them for a while at a coffee shop in Grinnell on Sunday morning. |
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