Road Trip Journal #3

 

Thursday, February 4^th

 

Coeur d’Alene is charming on its residential streets, but a little hip and soulless downtown. Real estate here is booming, and the main drag is full of those tacky lit-up photos that realtors love. Still, a nice little harborfront. Took a stroll and pressed on.

 

Into Washington! Eastern Washington is fairly flat, and beautiful in a desolate, Nebraska-like way. Then you start to see mountains looming in the distance – and then you start to climb up into them…

 

Wenatchee has a nice dramatic setting, by a river with mountains looming around. I didn’t stop, but admired it from the road.

 

Leavenworth lives up to its billing as a “Bavarian Village” – in spades. It’s a virtual Alpine Disneyland; even the hospital makes a vague effort to fit the theme. It’s very touristy, of course, but also quite impressive – and there’s nothing chintzy or contrived about the beautiful mountains that form the backdrop.

 

After Leavenworth, you’re really in it – plunging between mountains with a river on your left and nary a town in sight. Beautiful. Somewhere near Mount Howard (I think) a snowstorm started, and although it wasn’t nearly as bad as the one that stymied my progress into Montana, I did have to stay alert. Coming down out of the mountains, I had the most striking climatic shift of the whole journey – from blizzard to rainforest in what felt like 20 minutes. The moss was thick on the trunks of the trees that hemmed in the road on both sides. It was like driving through a jungle. When the road flattened out, I stopped for a smoothie at the Mountain View Brew in the town of Startup (???). The local grocery store had a sign above it reading: “DVDs, milk, wood, got beer.” I thought that was lovely. I took a photo.

 

Onward to Seattle, where I dropped my bags at the Ace Hotel in Belltown (just north of the waterfront district) and then walked a couple of miles to Café Pettirosso for dinner with Nick Tamburro. We ate on the sidewalk under a tent (Covid!), and afterward we took a stroll through Cal Anderson Park, which last year was the epicenter of a big months-long protest. There was no trace of any of that; it was clean and peaceful. Nick walked me back to the waterfront, and we shared a masked hug before parting ways.