DAYTRIP TO CARNATION

Woke up yesterday morning, glanced out the front windows, and noticed that the little daffodils I planted in the Fall are beginning to blossom! Perhaps sunny days are ahead after all – under the continual heavy and overhanging gray clouds of the PNW … especially on the riverfront, one begins to wonder if we will ever see the sun or feel the warm sunrays again. The early-blooming daffodils add a much needed and appreciated dash of bright and cherry color to a dark and gloomy landscape:

Then after looking at the daffodils for a while, while drinking my coffee and watching the gray clouds hover and promising more rain, I thought “I gotta get away from these 4 walls and into some fresh air”. Where could we go that we haven’t already been a thousand times or better? Then the name ‘CARNATION’ popped into my head – I saw the name of that town on the map a few years ago but we never got around to getting there, so I turned to Hubs and said, “How about a little road trip to Carnation?” He asked, “What the heck is Carnation, and where is it?” I said, “A Winter bouquet flower, and a town someplace in Washington State. Up the road a little bit.” Well, he gets on google and comes back with, “It’s not ‘up the road a little bit’; it’s a long way up the road. And there would be a lot of freeway and city driving unless we went up through Morton – and that would add an extra hour or so to the drive. So I start calculating the distance in my head: 2 or 3 hours each way, to and from; we could be back home by Suppertime. And I really want to go.

So, off we go.

We drive for at least 4 hours in spotty rain showers getting there. Google was an hour off in their calculations. But that’s okay. We can still get there and back before it’s time to set the table for chow at home. 15 minutes from Carnation, we see this:

So we follow the detour route. How bad can it be? Turns out it was pretty bad; the entire town was under water … fields afloat. Huge, lapping puddles both sides of the roadway, squeezing the road down to one lane dead-center in some places. But we made it to Carnation.

I had NO IDEA the town was THE ‘Carnation’ of world renowned fame! I was thinking flower, not milk. A bit into the town I saw the Cow statue, and the Diary Farm; but it wasn’t until I saw the sign in the foliage that things began to click away in my head ;-)

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/carnation-farms-namesake-of-a-town-and-a-worldwide-milk-brand-welcomes-visitors-again/

After viewing the farm, we headed back home, but found every route out of town blocked by ‘Road Closed’ signs. We were in effect landlocked in farm country. So we backtracked and ended up in rush hour traffic in Seattle. NOT FUN. We were engaged in an hour and a half freeway crawl which canceled Supper at home because now we’d be lucky to make home before 10 p.m. bedtime. As soon as possible, we jumped the freeway and found something to eat. Then we beat feet for home. And touched down at 9:15 p.m. SCORE!

All in all it wasn’t a bad drive (even though my 6 or 7 hour estimation based on Google’s predictions ended up being an 11 hour ordeal); and we got a History Lesson too. If not for the road closures and freeway snafu, we’d have been home around 6 p.m. easy-peasy. That’s my story and I’, sticking to it …