We drive through Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mts. The Cascades are jagged above the treeline. On the way, we visit Wallace Falls.
As we are driving up a big hill, we hear someone honking at us and pointing to our car. We pull over, thinking someone is trying to tell us we have a problem with our RV. This has happened twice before. Once we ignored the warning and found when we reached our destination that our car had slid nearly halfway off the tow dolly. So we are not going to ignore this signal.
Suddenly we see a very familiar woman standing on the shoulder of the road with something dangling from her hands: Joy and Ricardo have driven 80 miles to Stevens Pass to catch us, thinking we have left our binoculars hanging on the doorway to our bedroom. But they are not ours.
On the way home, they have picked up two hitchhikers from Albuquerque. We laugh at their craziness, but are grateful they are such good and loyal friends.
The road takes us through a tunnel in the mountain. There are many old RR trestles over clear creeks with small rapids. Thousands of fish are struggling to swim upstream.
The cliffsides along the road are so likely to have rockslides that the highway department has installed steel mesh overlays with 6 inches of cable going through the mesh.
Our campground tonight is in Soap Lake, WA, so named because the water is so full of minerals it feels soapy . The sand around it has a layer of salts on top. If you go to the edge near the water, the mud is like quicksand.
The campground provides you with a hose to wash off the mineral water before exiting the area. You are not allowed to enter their pool wearing the same clothes with which you swim in Soap Lake.
Fall is beginning to show itself in the changing colors of the trees and ground-cover. This makes Leavenworth, the faux-German town in the "Bavarian Alps" all the more charming. We eat weinerschnitzel and sauerbraten at a local restaurant.
The roadsides are covered with apple orchards. Under the trees are 6 ft. square wooden containers for the apple-pickers. There are miles of green apples, then miles of red. Corinne tries to photograph the boxes, but in her quest for the perfect composition, ends up with nothing worth saving. This goes in the category of "You Can't Have Everything".
This is not all the State of Washington one would expect. It is dry and desert-like, with sandy hills, scrub and sagebrush between the irrigated orchards. Many of the orchards use rows of cedars for windbreaks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment