Montana and Washington
OK, so we now have a front-runner:
We’ve visited Western Montana a couple of previous times, and had even taken a cursory look at real estate on one of those vacations, so it wasn’t very surprising that we stalled out and ended up spending a couple extra days in both the Whitefish-Flathead Lake region and the Missoula area (it didn’t hurt that the University of Montana had a big home game that weekend, so the whole town was hyped up and decked out in maroon).
I think the biggest reason for our attraction to that part of Montana is that it’s a lot like Alaska, only with a real summer, and four actual seasons (well, there’s more to it than that, but that is part of it). The mentality and attitude of Montanans is similar to Alaskans’ and the outdoors has a very strong influence on the lifestyle, so we feel like we’d fit in well. Another plus is the fact that it’s attached to the rest of the country, so we can get out on the highway in the RV for a vacation without first having to drive a couple weeks through Canada, and we’re finding that we’d like to do a good deal more exploring in the Pacific Northwest. I had already checked into the University of Montana previously, and found that it had respectable, if not stellar programs for both me and Laura. Plus, I know my cousin Patrick would love to have a Western Montana base of operations for fly-fishing expeditions, so I know where he’s rooting for… :)
In any event, we were enjoying ourselves so much that I forgot to take pictures: I think part of it is that we’ve been here before, so it wasn’t new to us, but you’ll just have to imagine this part of our trip- sorry.
After Montana, we drove straight through Idaho and on through Eastern Washington to the Seattle area, where we spent the night in a Camping World parking lot before having a satellite dish installed on the RV so that we could restart our Dish-Net subscription (it is football season, after all). We took a quick drive up onto the Olympic Peninsula and learned that this was one of the areas we would need to revisit. Laura finally got started on visiting her wineries/vineyards so that I wouldn’t get the evil eye every time we went to a microbrewery (oh yeah, did I forget to mention that Western Montana has some good microbreweries? another checkmark there…)
-I’m going to have to do a post to recap the breweries we’ve visited one of these days, although we didn’t make it to one in Washington until hours before we headed into Oregon.
We then spent several pleasant days visiting with my aunt and uncle, as well as associated cousins and their families. I have to say that everyone outdid themselves with their helpfulness and hospitality, and it was a great opportunity to relax from our traveling and reconnect with relatives we’ve not seen in a long time, as well as some we were meeting for the first time. My Uncle Jerry and Aunt Rosemarie had arranged for us to be able to park the RV next door to their home at a neighbor’s, and even offered an electrical connection with a breaker we managed to pop only twice.
As part of this visit, we went to Issaquah one day to experience all things salmonid at their Salmon Days festival. For how large of a role salmon plays in the lives of Alaskans, we’ve got nothing on these Issaquahians (Issaquites? Uncle Jerry, you’ll have to enlighten us on that one…) as far as their celebration is concerned. The festival is a huge, street-closing event with a parade and hundreds of booths with artisans and foods. All in all, very impressive, even given the gale force winds blowing the rain horizontal.
Now, while Western Washington is very lush and green, there’s a reason for that- and for all my uncle’s attempts to convince us that we would get used to the rain, it’s just too wet for us. We’re coming from a place where we already got ‘too much:’ too much winter, too much dark, etc…so we’re looking for a place that doesn’t have too much of anything. Oh yeah, and there are way too many people in the Seattle area, and nowhere near enough roads to hold them. It was a good thing we were traveling in the RV for some stretches of I-5 near Tacoma, because it looked like we were gonna be camping out in the middle lane for a while. Montana, on the other hand, has a reasonable number of people (checkmark there).
After our visit in the Seattle area, we jogged back east to Central Washington, to the town of Leavenworth, AKA ‘Little Bavaria,’ so Laura could be introduced to her German heritage. Leavenworth was a struggling little burg in the sixties, so the town leaders decreed that they would secede from the Union and align themselves with Bavaria. Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but they at least remade themselves to look like a town in the Bavarian Alps, and as a tourist draw, it seems to have worked out pretty well.
When we began to head back west, we were confronted with this at Stevens Pass:
Therefore, we knew that it was now time to head further south…
Next edition: Oregon- grapes, hops, huge aircraft, and salty seadogs…
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1 comment:
Bill, you're so polite: "...many people in the Seattle area, and nowhere near enough roads to hold them." Something abundantly clear during certain parts of the day. When visiting I only hit the roads between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m!
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