Well, we’re still three thousand miles and eight days away, but it feels like a different trip, now that we’re heading East instead of West or North and our own home is at the end of the road. We left Seattle around 9 on Monday, and by 10 the city was well behind us and we’d entered the mountainous terrain of Eastern Washington.

In the Northwest, it seems every major road follows a creek or river, and Route 2 hugs the Wenatchee River most of the way. It’s a beautiful river with all shades of personality: an overgrown brook gurgling over rocks turning to enthusiastic whitewater in a broadening river until it reaches the Columbia River just north of the town of Wenatchee.

We ate lunch in Leavenworth, a town that, faced with extinction in the early 1900s when the mining and logging industries dried up and the railroad literally pulled up its tracks and left, completely reinvented itself to be a Bavarian village. The helpful woman at the Visitor Center was dressed like a character out of Heidi.

“There’s no German heritage here'” she said. “It’s all Walt Disney. A couple of creative developers saw the potential of building a tourist industry on the Bavarian nature of the surroundings and sold it to the city council. The business community bought into it as well and created what we have today.”
What they have is a thriving winter sports industry, as well as a busy fall Octoberfest and March and April bring tourists when the snow is melting. From what we observed, the summer season is well-attended too.

Shortly after heading out of Leavenworth, we met up with the bicyclists who had signed on for the 2013 RAW (Ride Across Washington) 15: “Pines to Vines.” They were well into their third day of the ride traveling 65 miles from Lake Chelan to Leavenworth which included 2,972 feet of climbing and 2,920 feet of descent. We agreed they were made of sturdier stuff than we, and we especially cheered on those at the rear, a good 30 miles or so behind the head of the pack. Fortunately they had a day of rest to look forward to at Leavenworth.

Making time and miles was the agenda for the rest of the day, except for a brief detour through Spokane, a city we’ve skirted several times on convenient bypasses to avoid the town traffic, to see their Riverfront Park. The river was less than notable, moving sluggishly along the park, but the park sculpture was delightful: a huge wagon for the children, and an inspirational crowd of runners in metal.

We spent the night just across the state line at a campground in Post Falls, Idaho. Tomorrow, we’ll spend a brief time crossing the panhandle of Idaho and head on into Montana.