ottawa - the tulip photos

ok, so i'm sunburnt again and my legs are sort of achy, cause i spent all of yesterday walking around. this is the most touristy thing i've done since...quebec city in winter? i dunno. i've never been to a tulip festival before, so yay i chose my daytrip to ottawa to coincide with the second-to-last day of their tulip festival, on the long weekend to boot.
i'm a bit stumped re: how to narrate this thing, cause it was only a bunch of kilometers' worth of flowers. so i think photos are the way to go.

started off next to parliament hill, in a nice park where i made friends with a portuguese waterdog called oreo. not pictured, because my camera battery was already failing and my one attempt happened before i started chatting to the owner. anyway, that dog was a one-animal petting zoo for the entire park. 

people were sitting down on the grass all around, but even if the weather was fantastic, i felt it was too windy to sit, except directly in the sun. so i only ended up sitting for about 15 mins the entire day, and that was when my legs gave up.

lots of families with small children milling around. but i liked it. absolutely everybody was friendly and in a good mood. seriously. is there something in ottawa water, or was it just the weather?

being very meta re: picture taking. but i mean i don't like to pretend the tulips were there in blissful solitude. man, oh no, nothing could be farther from the truth

i am not really a fan of tulips. ha! like, the individual flower does nothing much for me. i like the striking image of a field of countless flowers much better - impression in numbers. but yesterday i learned, for example, that i prefer them half-open, and that i like the purple and orange ones best

these are huge flowers. but see, at this point of openness and...accumulation, they don't even look like tulips to me any more. ok, i'm just being weird.

the thing is, there are tulip routes or something, to the main locations of flower madness. i took one of them, sort of randomly, along the rideau canal, to dow's lake park. it was more than an hour's walk. 

see? do these look like tulips to you? these plants are really bizarre

among my very favourites

i mean, don't imagine that it was tulips non-stop for 6.5 kilometers. it was patches like this one from time to time. but pretty often.

fully open. it is end of the festival after all. but i think they look stunning like this. full bloom, right?

yeah so there were zero indicators along the way. i know visitors are expected to document themselves and blah, or take a shuttle directly there etc, but i am a reluctant tourist at best, so i just ploughed ahead with my very general map. 

almost there, but not there yet.

still not there. but close.

at least there were more tulips than people in that park. but not by much, really.

this, one of my favourites - it's called 'queen irene'

and another favourite - 'gold dust' - they look more like carnations, right?

more red on red in various forms

and these are my favourite of the pink ones. how do i know this? cause by that time i was like, ok, i'm only gonna photograph my favourites, ok? gah. 

'orange princess'

there's no conclusion to this post, because, what? flowers are pretty?