Canadian Tulip Festival – Lansdowne Park, Ottawa

We are just back from one of the best Tulip Festivals in the World – in Ottawa, Canada. It took place from May 11-21 and showcased 1,000,000+ tulips in bloom across 4 locations. To add to the extravaganza, there were arts and cultural performances as well, along with activities to do and attractions to explore!

After doing research online and via the official website for the festival, we thought of spending the couple of hours we had the day we reached there in Lansdowne Park. It is a market area, so was bustling with activity at that time of the hour. We parked on the road (paid parking of $3/hour) and made our way to the grounds where the tulips were.

The first sight of tulips was quite exciting for me as we had not seen so many of them since long. There was a garden of yellows in the view!The park is right alongside the Rideau Canal (202 kilometers long), another major attraction there. We started heading further up in the park with just a road separating us and the canal. There were people jogging and running by the canal, and we spotted kayakers too the next day.Our presumption was we would see hordes of tulips as far as we could see them, but that was not the case here. There were tulips, but only at certain places in patches. Anyway, the walk was quite a good one to keep was occupied. In fact, there was spring beauty all around, which just made our day!We had paid for the parking for only an hour, as there have been instances in the past when we paid for more than an hour just to come back within the hour. So, in about 40 minutes, we started walking back after seeing a bunch of other-colored tulips.The market area is quite a good one to spend some time socializing. If you have to admire the canal or kayak through it, there is a much better place, one that also had the kind of display of tulips we were expecting to see. I will cover that in a dedicated post.