Day 83 - Thursday, 9/10/09- ON THE ROAD

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.

Day 81-Tuesday, 9/8/09, SETTLED

Today we go to a Salmon Ladder on Puget Sound and watch three different kinds try to swim upstream. Once they get out, they jump for joy, literally, doing backflips and coming fully out of the water, sometimes in twos and threes. It's really something to see. They use the smell of the ocean to guide them from the fresh water to the salt. Underneath the fish ladder there are acrylic windows that allow us to see the salmon as they enter, stop and try to acclimate themselves to the reversing current of the bay where it meets the sea, and finally scoot themselves out the other end to the ocean.

In addition we watch two sets of boats move from the ocean to the sound through the Ballard Locks. They have to be raised up 15 feet to get out. Watching the staff work with the ropes to guide the boats through is fascinating. Boats don't have to pay a fee.

In the evening we have a wonderful dinner at an authentic Oaxican Mexican restaurant that is nothing like the usual Tex-Mex that we normally get. The mole' sauces are sweet and the tomatillo is out of this world. Bob gets tamales, a special treat since his sister-in-law Carmen was not able to make us any when we were in Texas, due to her injured wrist.

Day 80 - Monday (Labor Day) , 9/7/09, SETTLED

Joy and Ricardo have set up a brunch to be hosted by Joy's daughter Becca at her house in Burien. They have cooked everything in advance. Two of her other siblings Aaron and David were there with their spouses, but Devorah was absent, since she had to buy homeschooling books for her two girls.

Ethan and Heather enjoy the brunch, meeting some fellow Seattlites with one degree of separation.

We go to the local Goodwill and have a hard time finding a place to park. Heather and I both buy necklaces.

Heather is coming down with a cold, so we go back to the apartment to feed her some tea. Bob and Ethan go out to get Vietnamese soup, which is the perfect thing for a chilly day and soothes Heather's throat.

After supper, we watch a Netflix copy of "Stepbrothers" on Ethan's computer. We contemplate several times turning it off, but we stick it out, and it gets better towards the end.