Leg 3 - Seattle

 Greetings loyal readers - while this blog is titled Seattle, we spent the better part of a week in the state of Washington, with a few twists and turns in our itinerary - as you will see.

On Monday, August 7, we left Michael and Kat's place in Portland and headed up the Columbia River Gorge on I-84.  We've been in the gorge a number of times and it's fantastic.  We crossed the Columbia at Bigs Junction and headed up past Yakima into central Washington on the east side of the Cascades.  The picture on the left was taken as Melinda was driving on Highway 97 - it's a bit hard to see but this is Mount Adams which is second highest mountain in Washington at 12,200 feet.  You can't see the whole mountain because it's covered in a large cloud - on a clear day.  It's as if the mountain created its own weather.  The rest of our drive took us to Chelan, Washington (population 4,400) at the south end of Lake Chelan.  BTW, Chelan is the home town of Joe Harris, the former star basketball player for UVa who is now been playing in the NBA.  Thanks to our son Brian for reminding us that Joe is from Chelan.

We stayed in Chelan so that on Tuesday, August 8, we could take a ferry trip up Lake Chelan.  Lake Chelan is a 55 miles long glacially carved lake that is the 3rd deepest lake in the U.S.  We took the 8:00 a.m. ferry that took us to Stehekin, Washington (population 75) at the north end of the lake.  There are no roads to Stehekin and everything there must be shipped up the lake.  On our bus tour, the first stop was the old Stehekin School (picture at right).  This school served K-8 until 1987 when the "new" school was built.  Last year, 2 kids graduated from 8th grade at the new school.  They go to high school in Chelan - 55 miles away.

Our next stop on the tour was Rainbow Falls.  This is a beautiful waterfall and for those who don't know it, Melinda is a waterfall junkie.  She loves waterfalls of all sizes and types - and this was a good one.  Stehekin was such an interesting place to visit.  There is a paved one lane road that is 13 miles long that accommodates vehicles (there aren't many), bikes, ATV's and pedestrians.  

After taking the ferry back down the lake, we took off and drove along the Columbia River again heading for the town of Winthrop, Washington where we spent the night.  Our plan was to drive west from Winthrop on Highway 20 through North Cascades National Park all the way through to Burlington, Washington north of Seattle.  Our plans began to change when a woman on our tour told us that Highway 20 through the park was closed due to the Sourdough fire.  This provided us with a conundrum since Highway 20 is the only way into the park and the only short way to reach Seattle.  

To make a long story short, we changed our hotel reservations and decided to drive up Highway 20 until we found where the road was closed and then go back the way we came.  On Wednesday, August 9, we left Winthrop (see picture of Winthrop's western look on the left) and started driving up the highway.  Our first stop was at Washington Pass (5,400 feet) where there was a great viewpoint (see picture below).

 It turned out that Highway 20 had been reopened that morning but no communications had gone out.  We kept driving along waiting to be turned back until we finally ran into a ranger who told us the road was open, but that all the viewpoints and hiking trails were closed - all we could do was drive through.  So that's what we did - driving all the way to the western entrance sign (see below) and then back again through the park to the east.   The park was beautiful from what we could see from the road although it did rain most of the time we were on the west side of the park with temperatures in the 50's.

While we were disappointed at how things turned out, we also knew that North Cascades is really a back country wilderness park and we weren't planning to do any extensive hiking and certainly no camping and we understood the need to use the highway for the fire fighting effort.

Near the Visitor Center for the park, there is the small community of Newhalem.  As we drove through, we saw that every clear space was filled with tents and services for the fire fighters (see picture below taken from the car).  I'm sure there were two or three hundred tents in this small area along with food service tents and mobile showers.   It was pretty amazing, and we're thankful for the men and women who were working hard in tough conditions (hopefully the rain helped).

We made it back to Wenatchee without any issues after a confusing 24 hours, no worse for the wear with another story to tell.

Given our change in plans, our journey from Wenatchee back west to Seattle was fairly short.  So, on Thursday, August 10, we planned a stop in the town of Leavenworth, Washington along the way on Highway 2.  Leavenworth (not to be confused with the penitentiary in Kansas) is a small town of 2,200 people located on the eastern side of the Cascades.

Back in the 1960's, Leavenworth was a declining lumber town.  The city leaders decided to remake the town's architecture into that of a Bavarian village as a way to draw tourists.  Sixty years later, the town is a major tourist draw and there are lots of hotels, shops, restaurants, etc. all in Bavarian themed buildings (see picture to the left) - including two stores selling nutcrackers.  We stopped and walked around window shopping (Melinda) and had lunch there (Brats for me).  After leaving town, we immediately climbed into the Cascades and eventually rolled into Redmond, Washington to spend the night.

On Friday, August 11 we planned to go see the Seattle Mariners play the Baltimore Orioles.  Since the game wasn't until 7:10, we decided to drive north of Seattle and visit Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound.  We entered the island (which is 37 miles long) from the north via the Deception Pass bridge (see picture to the right).  This is the only bridge onto Whidbey Island.  We had lunch at the state park there and went to the rocky beach.  We then drove the length of Whidbey Island and took the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry back to the mainland.  The ferry holds about 140 cars and took 20 minutes.  Unfortunately, that put us 25 miles north of the stadium at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon.  It was a tough drive down to T-Mobile park but we made it to the game in plenty of time.

As for the baseball game, I thought this would be a good one - the Mariners were on a 7 game win streak and Orioles have the best record in the American League.  However, this one was never in doubt as the Mariners romped 9-2 behind a 4 RBI night from Julio Rodriguez to the delight of the 36,000 attending.  This is the third time we've seen a game at T-Mobile including two years ago with our grandson Shane.  It's always a beautiful place to watch a game and see the sun go down against the Seattle skyline.

This weekend, Felix Hernandez, the star pitcher from 2005 - 2019 for the M's, will be inducted into the Mariner's Hall of Fame.  The first pitch for our game was thrown out by a 10 year old boy named Felix Hernandez accompanied by his father and grandfather - both also named Felix Hernandez.  And the pitcher Felix Hernandez caught the first pitch.  Definitely a cool albeit bizarre moment. 

Our next stop is Spokane which will be our jumping off point for Montana and Glacier National Park.