Wenatchee is nearly 400kms from Burnaby, but the drive down on Thursday night took us 6.5 hours. This included slow-moving peak hour traffic getting out of the city, and 1 hour and 10 minutes to get across the Canada-USA border. Most of this wait was actually just getting to the front of the line-up of cars! But then we had to go inside and pay $6pp for our entry paperwork into the US. Anyway, can't complain - a workmate said it took her family 3.5 hours to get across the next morning!!
Getting to Wenatchee involved heading down the coast almost to Seattle, and then turning inland for the second half of the journey. As we neared Wenatchee, making excellent time and seeing few other cars on the highway, we could tell the scenery would have been spectacular if only we could see it! There were high snow banks beside the road, and large mountains looming through the darkness in all directions. At 10:30pm we arrived at Doug and Barb's welcoming home, an hour earlier than our GPS had predicted. It was wonderful to see them again!
The next day, Good Friday, they took us to the nearby town of Leavenworth. In a nutshell, this is Europe in America! In the 1960s, the citizens of Leavenworth began an incredibly successful undertaking to turn their dying railway town into a thriving Bavarian-themed village. With the snow- and pine-covered mountains rising dramatically all around, and the prevailing Germanic architectural style - adopted by every establishment from the touristy main street to the servo to the Safeway grocery store to the many hotels lining the highway - we really could have been in a little Austrian village in the Alps! Yes, of course it's a complete "tourist trap", but it is so well done that we couldn't help but admire their proactive and ingenius way of saving their town!
Here is a photo of a postcard showing past and present...
And here are some photos of Leavenworth's main street...
We split up to explore the town, met up with Doug and Barb for lunch, and then spent another couple of hours exploring. Some of the interesting shops we came across included: a cheesemonger where we bought crackers and Stilton and Blueberries cheese (the closest they had to our UK favourite, Wensleydale and Cranberries!)... a music box store with awesome Phantom of the Opera and Harry Potter musical snowglobes... a fudge store where we purchased 1.5 pounds of scrumptious fudge in six varieties... "An Australian Store" (yes, in America's little Bavaria... ah, globalisation!!) where we purchased Tim Tams and saw lots of other familiar brands (more later on the fate of the Tim Tams)... a fun hat shop... a store selling hot sauce so hot that there were numerous warning signs on the taster bottles and a sign saying "water: $1.50; after trying hot sauce: $20"... and lots more!
On the way back to Wenatchee, we stopped in at Smallwood's Harvest, which is a combination of petting zoo and country store. Lots of interesting regional products such as berry-flavoured honey and Amish-made pasta! Here's a photo of Ben with Doug and Barb, and one of us with some funny Easter Bunny scarecrows...
The drive to and from Leavenworth - along the road we had travelled over in the dark the night before - was beautiful. Wenatchee is called the "Apple Capital of the World", and the hills and valleys around the city have many fruit orchards. At this time of the year the fruit trees were bare and white, but it was still a pretty sight!
I'll be back soon to tell you about the rest of our weekend! Hope you all had a very special Easter!
2 comments:
Like your boots Ben! Wouldn't be the first time you had to get out of the car at the border! Glad you had a good time
From the old chickens
I wondered if you might recognize Leavenworth. The road through the mountains, through Leavenworth and on to Wenatchee is the same road we took on the way to Montana in 2003!
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