Exploring Thanksgiving Point

Thanksgiving Point: A privately funded garden planted with guess how many tulips?

Give up?

Apparently there is a run on the number 250,000; yes while Red Butte was digging in that many daffodils, Thanksgiving Point was planting the same number of tulips.

What do I know about Thanksgiving Point?

Not much before we went there on Saturday late in the afternoon.

It was the same place that we went to at Christmas time to drive through a light sculpture event.

We hadn't ever seen the place in the daylight hours.

When I saw ads in the newspaper hawking the tulip celebration there I made space on my calendar for a trip. After we wrapped up our yard sale, B. and Jeff did a little chipping on the golf course while I got my weekly facial.

We re-grouped at 3:30 and pointing the car south, we traveled 23 miles down the road to see what we could see.

Lines of cars were coming up the Thanksgiving Point exit; we hoped that the crowds would be thinned out by the time we arrived.

It took a few moments to find parking, and then we hoofed it toward the ticket office, pausing only to shoot a close up of one of the many blooming trees shading the parking lot.

It didn't take much to figure out the way to the garden's entry point; the tulips led the way!

We each paid ten dollars for one of these stickers.

Worth every penny as having one on our shirt allowed us to visit the garden.

Let the ooohhh ahhhs begin!

We followed child size footprints in the concrete around the corner where these tulips were glowing in the sunshine.

But wait!!!

Not only were there tulips around the corner, there was also this amazing sculpture!

Noah's Ark!

How cool is this? Noah with the dove with a bit of olive branch in it's beak.

Best yet, the sculpture shows the animals EXITING the Ark!

It took a moment to register in my brain that I don't think I have ever seen the Ark
shown with the animals exiting.

How odd is that; isn't that moment the high point of the whole story?

I'm loving the whimsy...

People were there to greet and photograph the animals as they left the ark.

(I wonder why that part wasn't mentioned in the Bible...)

A wee lass considers her great, great, great, great, great (add a couple dozen more greats here) grandmother.
If you believe the story of the Ark, then this lady is related to you too.

(You may want to consider this post to be a virtual family reunion of sorts!)

Even those who believe their distance fore bearer were apes had their reunion...

Or maybe this is just another example of the old saying "boys will be boys"...

Little boys, one after another, took the opportunity to climb up the exiting monkey arms.

Well, I can honestly say that if all I saw was the Ark sculpture and the tulips leading up the garden and around the sculpture I would have considered our ticket money well spent.

But that was only the beginning of what wonders would be revealed as we continued on our garden visit.

Come back tomorrow to see more of the tulip show! I've got a lot of great pictures to show!