Tulip festival
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

The news this year was the weather. Last year we had three perfect days. This year was a little more challenging. Some rain was in the forecast everyday.

This year we not only had our regular store, but we also had the Straat Winkel, which is a little shop pulled out onto the street just north of the Court House. The Orange City Steering Committee ran it in the past, but this year we ran it for them. It was fun because we were right in the middle of everything, i.e. the parade, the art fest, the author’s corner, etc.

One of the best things about the festival this year was that my daughter, Juliana, came home to help us. Juliana lives in San Diego and makes many of the things we sell in the shop. I’m sorry that it was so cold for her, but people seemed to find our little store anyway (maybe to get out of the cold).

RAGBRAI
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

The next big event in Orange City is RAGBRAI. RAGBRAI stands for Register’s (the Des Moines Register) Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. This was started 45 years ago and is one of the most popular bike rides in the United States, if not the World. This year’s ride will be the third flattest route in the history of the ride. It will start in Orange City and end 411.4 miles later in Lansing. We anticipate approximately 20,000 people in our little town the night before the start of the ride. There will be 13,078 feet of climb. You can find out more about it at www.RAGBRAI.com.

Orange City will be setting up a stage for entertainment for the event. The stage will be about 60 feet from the front of our store, so we should be right in the middle of all of it.

One of the special events that Orange City in promoting leading up to RAGBRAI is to encourage everyone in town to wear RAGBRAI tee shirt every Friday. Local businesses are encouraged to give discounts each Friday to anyone entering their store wearing a RAGBRAI tee shirt. The theme for Orange City is “Dutch until Dawn” and was thought of by a young lady from elementary school. It will be the first time RAGBRAI has started in Orange City and we hope will be a very positive experience for all involved.

UPS
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

Don’t forget that we ship UPS. We used to have more businesses that handled UPS shipments, but one of the main ones no longer does this, so I’m not sure who else in town handles shipments. However, if we have an item in the shop by 3:00 p.m., we can see that it ships that day. UPS is still a good way to ship things and you can track it along the way.

Tornadoes
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

While getting ready for the Tulip Festival May 17, the Orange City sirens went off and our phones said to “Take shelter now.” First all the people in the stores on our side of the road went outside to look, then we all went inside to spend a little time in our basements. Better safe than sorry. We were not hit by any though and are grateful for that.

Perusing our Guest Book
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

I’m not going to begin describing which states were accurately turned over this month on our “states board”. As of right now every state is turned over. Although we have had a lot of people in our shop this month, I know we didn’t cover every state. Not only were kids flipping the states over, but I also saw several adults flipping them over randomly. So, this month we will take our visitors directly from the guest book (and any others that I can specifically remember). Since the 20 th of last month, we have had visitors from Arizona, Arkansas, California, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, Washington and many other states. We have also had several visitors from several different places in the Netherlands including Meppel, Zwolle and Zeist. All of them left us long messages, but I will have to get out the Dutch-English translations programs to interpret them. We also had visitors from Canada and South Africa and during the Tulip Festival we had a whole family speaking Bengali, a language spoken in India. I know we had many other states, but since they all are turned over, I can’t be accurate about that. We’ll try again next month and try make sure people only turn over their own state.