We left here around noon, picking Emily from school and having lunch in the car on the way. We made it to Des Moines, IA around 7 Friday night. Got settled in the hotel and tried (tried is the key word here) to go to sleep. The girls were wound up, unsettled and having a hard time to get to sleep. We finally did - me in the chair with Rose since she wouldn't sleep in the pack n play or the bed... up at 6 we were... groggy and not liking the clothes we brought but we made it out of the hotel by around 8:30, drove to Pella, IA and got there around 9:15. Parked and took the shuttle bus (Nora was thrilled -"I've never been on a school bus before!!" - I think the whole bus heard her) to the festival and off we went.
We were first greeted with the huge windmill in town surrounded with tulips.. I have never seen such huge tulips before - some were almost as tall as Nora!!
We first took a tour of the windmill - supposedly the tallest in all North America - wandered the gift shop (bought some bread made from wheat ground at the windmill) and then out into the tulip gardens. Here's a video of us at the top of the windmill:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FrGvayeCWM
We started to wander around the historic village but we were getting hungry so we did just a few things and then went in search of lunch - (Emily wasn't thrilled to be the "boy" here as you can tell.. if you go through the Walmart album you can tell she was much happier being the girl).
The white house in the background is Wyatt Earp's boyhood home.
On our way to find lunch we found some dancers...
here's a link to them dancing:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xyydwsL2AY
The tulips were so pretty - the town was so cute and packed! It's a town of 10,000 people but they said at tulip time it gets to 150,000!! Here are some other sights we enjoyed... the street organ... Emily thought it was so neat to see them switch out the music, Rose enjoyed dancing to it: here's a video of her stretching her legs - not sure if I caught her dancing to it or not but it's still cute:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-MkTLrX3-4
Wooden shoes - we brought some home, the girls enjoyed watching them get made...
Dutch Letters - yum!!!!
Little Dutch Girls..
Family pictures...
Rope making - the girls got to take home a sample too...
The parade... these are the street inspectors before the parade started - we missed the "street cleaning" before they came through...
The tulip queen...
And then we headed back to the hotel... freshened up and headed out to dinner with my friend Melissa and her daughter Reese - I haven't seen her in 15 years - we went to FSU together. After dinner we took a tractor pull ride and then the girls played on the tractors. 
Sunday morning we hit the road again... leaving around 8:30... getting home around 3:30...
Love this part of Missouri on the way home..
Welcomed home to Mother's day goodies...
Here's Mom and I's stash of mother's day fun - cookies, flowers, cards, perfume... aren't the lilies and irises beautiful that Dad sent to Mom?!
If you want to browse through the rest of our pictures - here's the link to the Walmart album:http://photos2.walmart.com/walmart/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=5537671004/a=3401034_3401034/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=walmart/
