Day 13, July 22: Heading East

We are heading east for the first time in nearly two weeks. It's been nearly two weeks since we started on this venture! But first the daily details.

I've heard it said that, when you are planning for a trip, lay out all the clothes you think you need, then only pack half of them. We didn't do that, but I thought we had done a pretty good job of limiting what we brought. We ended up with two weekender bags for clothes and one gym bag for other stuff needed by old people (drugs, vitamins, etc.). We had a system where we just took the gym bag into a hotel with a change of clothes one night, then the whole mess the next night. It soon became apparent, that we just didn't need all the clothes we brought. The same went for Sheila who also brought a weekender and a smaller bag for her clothes. Since Aunt Maureen and her daughter Sharon drove to Seattle and were going directly back to Iowa and had plenty of space in their car and agreed to take some stuff back for us, we decided to cut back a bit. Sheila sent a bunch of her clothes and Mary and I pared down from two weekender suitcases to one. This is so much nicer. We can pack and unpack the car in half the time, and we really don't even need a cart at the hotels to get our stuff to the room. And Sheila says there is now more room for stuff she buys!

Anyway, we got up this morning and went to church. The Blaesing branch's newest addition was baptized during mass. It was a very nice service and gave Mary and Sheila one last opportunity to say good bye to folks.

Today was to be another transit day: Just get from Seattle to Spokane. However, Sheila enjoyed the drive to Leavenworth, WA so much yesterday, that she suggested we take that route. It turned out to be a great idea. Leavenworth sits in the lee of a range called the Icicle Mountains. Back in the 60s, the towns people decided to remodel the town to an Alpine / Bavarian motif. It has turned out to be a big success for them, and they now have something like 17 festivals a year there. The drive over there from Seattle is beautiful. We followed along the Snokomish River to Stevens Pass (4000+ feet) through the Cascades. We stopped at some very picturesque falls along the way. After we went over the pass, we followed the Watachee River down for a ways. This whole route (US 2) seems to follow the original Great Northern Railway route through the Cascades. That rail route is noteworthy because it opened up access to the North West that had been hampered by the Cascade Mountains. We really enjoyed the stop in Leavenworth (particularly the Ice Cream lunch).

Our plan was to stay on highway 2 all the way to Spokane, but the lady in the navigation system had other ideas. We ended up veering a bit south toward I-90 at Watachee before we realized what had happened. That area of the state (the middle region) is fairly flat and has lots of apple orchards. We saw some really large orchards along the way. Eventually we decided to head back toward highway 2 and go to the Grand Coulee dam. As we got further to the north, the landscape changed again to be much more rugged. The land was obviously shaped by glaciers and worn by water. The vistas were incredible. I took a few pictures, but I don't think they can do justice to what we saw. As Mary says it was "high on the wow factor". Sheila said it looked like what you see in all those old westerns where the outlaws are hiding out up on the rock outcroppings. We stopped at a couple of overlooks and at Steamboat Rock park to take pictures. Steamboat Rock is like many of the rock formations we saw, but is just out there all by itself.

The approach to the Grand Coulee dam was from the Roosevelt Lake side. That is the huge lake that was formed by the dam. The dam was not particularly impressive when we first saw it. It just kind of sticks up out of the water a bit. Once we moved on down to the downstream side of the dam, it was a different story. That thing is huge! The statistics on it are available on line so I won't detail them all here. Just suffice to say it is the largest such structure in the United States.

From there we headed on toward Spokane. Once again, the landscape changed and became this high (2000 ft. elev.) prairie that was mostly rolling hills with the mountains off in the distance. The most striking thing was the wheat fields. They just stretched literally as far as you could see (and we could see right far with the clear air). There would be mile after mile of wheat with no significant break -- not even a farm house. I noted one small road that went off from the highway that had 4 or five mail boxes at the end of the road, but you could not see anything down the road. No houses, no barns, just wheat. There were a few little towns along the way that probably existed just to support the wheat farmers. Each town had a large grain storage facility and not much else. There was one town named Davenport that had a bit more, but it was still a fairly small town -- nothing like Davenport, IA.

So here we are at our hotel now. This is the same hotel and the same room we stayed in last Sunday when we were in Spokane. We liked the room so much then that we decided to book it right away for the return stop. I am not going to post pictures tonight (too tired), but will try to get them up with appropriate links in this blog entry tomorrow. We are really looking forward to going to Glacier.