poppy festival and vasquez rocks

Jesse and I went to the California Poppy Festival last weekend. We expected a nice little festival on the edge of a field that looked something like this:

Um, no. (And, by the way, I did NOT take that picture. It's from the official festival website.)

First of all, the festival itself was in the middle of the city of Lancaster, nowhere near any poppies, besides a very few that were at the entrance to the festival. You can just barely see them in the bottom left of the below picture.

It was a pretty typical festival for a mid-sized city, with mediocre craft stands and carnival rides. The highlight for us was our BBQ lunch. (We miss having a grill so much!) And, of course, festivals are just cheery places to be, so we were enjoyed ourselves despite the mediocrity.

Apparently the whole idea of the poppy festival is to introduce out-of-towners like us to the poppies in the surrounding area. So while we were at the festival, we got some suggestions for where to see poppies, with a warning that poppies don't like the wind too much.

We drove off to the area where we had been directed, and we saw this:

There were poppies growing in the field - you can see a hint of orange throughout the photo. But because of the wind, the poppies were all closed up and nearly invisible. :( It was quite disappointing. But we still enjoyed getting out of the city for the day, and we will just plan to go back next year on a day with good weather. We might skip the festival next time around, though!

On our way home (Lancaster is about 1 hour and 15 minutes away) we turned off at the Vasquez Rocks County Park, where we had seen beautiful rock formations on our way to the festival. The park was so beautiful in the setting sun. Again, it just felt nice to be out of the city and it was so fun to discover this amazing natural beauty so close to home. We walked around a little until the park closed. We found out later that (unsurprisingly) the park has been filmed for many movies and TV shows, including Star Trek in the 1960s. The rest of the pictures are from Vasquez Rocks.