Home » Travel » That’s Ranunculus: Carlsbad Flower Fields

That’s Ranunculus: Carlsbad Flower Fields

We recently headed south to San Diego for a dual sayonara/first birthday fiesta and I managed to strong arm the family into a side trip on the way home.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

I had seen families frolicking in flower fields all over Instagram (Texas bluebells, anyone?!) and hit up my trusty know-it-all, Google to find some flowers in our area for this snap happy mama. Ain’t no shame in my instagram-mom game. I came across the Carlsbad Flower Fields and our road trip detour was officially scheduled.

Pro-tip: skip the ticket line and buy online. Since we went on a weekend, it was PACKED and the line was wrapped around the parking lot (and we were there early, thanks to our little chickens cockadoodle-dooing at an ungodly hour). I ended up buying our tickets on my phone and we smugly waltz on it ahead of the crowds. I’m assuming weekdays would be a little less intense with the hordes of people but these fields are only open a few months a year so, maybe not.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

I wish I could say the kids were as thrilled as I was to see my favorite flowers in glorious bloom but…toddlers don’t care.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

They were perfectly happy with just the wagon ride around the grounds and pose for all the photos, so long as it involved a piece of large farming machinery.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

The amount of cajoling it took for these photos is ridiculous.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

A stranger took pity on us and took a few family photos for us. Harper was obviously thrilled for this impromptu photo shoot. Thankfully my standards have sunk to laughably low in terms of what constitutes a keeper picture. Everyone in the frame? 2/3 kids looking at the camera? Perfect, basically Christmas card material.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

I had to include this one because everybody wants to know if I “style” Lucy’s bouffant. All I can say is, she didn’t get it from her mama.

Carlsbad Flower Fields|Ahrens at Home

Of course I got suckered into the take-home bouquet and upon checkout the cashier cheerily informed us it was LADY BUG WEEKEND, ISN’T THAT FUN! What does that entail? Oh, a mesh bag of live lady bugs but did we mention, THEY ARE FREE, SO HOW FUN! Disgusted doesn’t quite cover our reaction to our newly acquired charges but we accepted our fate and prayed the entire ride home that those 367 bugs didn’t somehow escape into the back of the van because of course Hudson had to hold them the entire way home.

We cut them loose in the garden as soon as we parked the van in the driveway and they have since flown the coop to greener pastures gardens. I hope you caught all of the fun on snapchat.

1 Comment

  1. Auntie
    May 3, 2016 / 10:48 pm

    ❤❤

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *