Across the (purple) fruited plain

Lavender, lavender, lavender, everywhere, beautiful fields of lavender. The Festival in this town of 5500 is bigger and better than we imagined. Well organized, well advertised and well attended.It seems that every year gets bigger now in it's 13th year. Other towns in other places like Oregon do Lavender festivals but the specific climate here in the rain shadow between the Cascade and Olympic mountains means everything is very dry which is perfect forLavender. Here they have gotten 7 and 9 inches of rain in the last 2 years while 45 miles over the mountains is the highest rainfall in North America at 144" per year. It is an amazing change. Sequim has become a retirement community for people from Seattle and California who like the cool, dry weather. It has over 300 days of sunshine compared to Seattle and Tacoma which we hear from many is dreary and gray all winter and gets dark about 4:30 in the P.M.

There are 7 gardens on the tour and at every farm there is live music, food being cooked on site and served, drinks, desserts & ice cream as well as 12 to 15 vendors of all types of crafts. There are events all day long at each farm such as making lavender wreaths, lavender oils, meet the farmers, propagation talks and talks about the varieties. This is in addition to the downtown street festival which has live music all day and must have 100 or more vendors there that we haven't even started through. We made it out to 5 farms today and will go to 2 more tomorrow.

In the evenings there are 5 venues around town which have live music called "Jazz in the Alley." They serve food and desserts at each of those venues. We hit 2 of those tonight. Even though it was warm today the evenings cool into the 50's very quickly so sitting out past 6 or 9 requires a jacket. We went out to a restaurant tonight on the strait that you can see the cruise ships heading out of Seattle on Thurs, Fri and Sat nights down the west coast. We saw 2 huge ships in the short time we were there.