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We drove to “The” Bluebonnet festival in Ennis, Texas yesterday.

The website for the festival claimed that this was the only ‘official’ bluebonnet festival and it used alot of language to suggest this was THE place for Texas Bluebonnets.

Ennis was designated by the 1997 State Legislature as the home of the“Official Texas Bluebonnet Trail” and was designated the “Official Bluebonnet City of Texas.”

Remember to stop by the Ennis Visitor Center to pick up your highlighted Bluebonnet Trail Map.  The staff and volunteers at the Ennis Visitor Center will highlight the best trails on this map on the day of your visit.

So, we drove down there (about an hour drive from Arlington, TX) with somewhat high expectations.  After all, the bluebonnets around here are pretty impressive, so the bluebonnets in the “Official Bluebonnet City” ought to be out of this world!

We did find some bluebonnets in one small section of a park at the beginning of the ‘bluebonnet trail’ and took some photos.  We were pretty disappointed by the amount of bluebonnets at the park, but thought we were likely to see some fantastic fields of bluebonnets as we drove along the trail, so we moved on.

However, for the next hour or so, we traveled along the trail and saw almost NO more bluebonnets!  It seems the ‘Offical Bluebonnet City’ does not have many bluebonnets this year or our friendly volunteer highlighted the wrong trail(s) when I picked up the trail map!
 
It worked out okay, we had fun driving in the country (sans bluebonnets), we had a nice picnic outside and everyone stayed relatively happy for the entire outing.

We did see some really beautiful bluebonnets on our drive back home (between Dallas and Arlington) so we did get to enjoy some bluebonnets after all.

Just be warned - if you are going to Ennis for the Bluebonnet Festival - don’t get your hopes up that your going to be seeing very many bluebonnets!