Tulips and the Great Eclipse of 2024

Nothing could have eclipsed my pleasure of seeing Donna enraptured by acres of beautiful tulips of every color. Well, actually….

On the day of the much-hyped eclipse, Donna and I took a day trip out to Nokesville, Virginia to visit Burnside Farms to pick tulips. Getting there from our home in Maryland requires driving through dreaded, crowded, heavily trafficked Northern Virginia.

Shockingly, we made the 50-mile trek to Nokesville in an hour and a quarter, with no real slow-ups. And once we got off I-66, the landscape quickly morphed to suburban, then bucolic, with fields dotted with sheep and cows and a barn here and there. My heartrate slowed, my grip on the wheel loosened, and we eased through sanguine country lanes. The serenity was palpable.

We arrived at just about noon at what we expected to be a quiet little tulip field. Ha! It seemed that a majority of the billions of people against whom we had been jostling on the screaming Northern Virginia interstate had been en route to the tulip farm. We found a parking space among the acres of gravel and crunched our way to the entrance line that snaked fifty people long. A young man with a bullhorn shouted rules of engagement: Don’t step on the flower beds, don’t dig up the bulbs, be sure to find the food trucks, kiddie play area, Port-a-Johns.

We got in, got our basket, and were off. Donna was immediately entranced. Rows and rows of red tulips. Yellow tulips. Orange tulips. Pink tulips. Tulips with serrated petals or smooth petals. Tall stems, short stems. As far as you could see, every color of the rainbow, and then some. It really was beautiful. Hollandesque, you might, or might not, say. Donna was giggling with delight the entire time. “Oh my God! Look at these white ones! Oh! Look at those!” A couple women could be heard murmuring, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The admission fee included five tulips, so together we were entitled to 10. We ended with well north of two dozen. The exiting process was efficient, even with the large number of people in queue. Friendly staff members expertly wrap the flowers and mark the total, then you proceed to a cashier (such a quaint term in this cashless age) and then back to your car.

Our original plan after the tulips was to head to relatively nearby Haymarket, do some exploring and have lunch, then find a place there to watch the eclipse. But that would have had us driving into the teeth of Northern Virginia traffic during rush hour (another quaint expression-- as if you could rush, and as if it lasted only an hour). So we decided to head straightaway for home. The GPS showed us arriving at 2:46, in time to see almost all of the celestial event.

But then reality crept in. There was a 33-minute delay leading to the American Legion Bridge caused by a lane-closing construction project. The ETA began to backslide. It held at 2:52 for quite a while. Then 2:58 became the estimate as we crawled along like worms on their way to a bait shop. When it eclipsed(!) 3:00, we again shifted our plan, now to stop in a little strip mall in Silver Spring right on the way home. 

We finally got there, took much-needed biobreaks and got drinks at a Starbucks, and grabbed an outside table with an unobstructed view. We pulled out our eclipse glasses and gazed for about 45 minutes. It was magnificent. After living through many ballyhooed events that failed to measure up to the hype, this one delivered. We watched as the sun became 90% hidden. Daylight diminished a bit and it felt a little cooler. There were several others near us gawking up like us. And it felt good to be a part of something that actually brought people together for once.

All in all, it was a glorious day. I got to see Donna in her heaven-on-earth, and we saw the magnificence of a heavenly alignment that for a few minutes, anyway, gave a divided, antagonistic country a sign that we all share our short stay here together, so we should damn well figure out how to peacefully get along.