Leavenworth,WA-Our Final Stop

I have always wanted to spend some time in Leavenworth, Washington. It's a very unique little Bavarian town tucked in between tall and beautiful mountains. All the stores in town (even the Safeway) have hand painted Bavarian scenes. You see men on the street in lederhosen and women in long skirts, aprons and braids.

If you stop in Leavenworth for lunch, you see lots of brats and sauerkraut on the menu. Two years ago, on our way to Alaska, we stopped there. Unfortunately I had developed a "bug" and by the time we had walked into only two stores, I was so sick I only wanted be back in the RV, not on a shopping trip. So it was goodbye, Leavenworth.

 

Anyway, here we are again in Leavenworth for two whole days. We walked a few of the shops together before going back to the RV. Don, bless his heart, will shop with me for a while, but I know he doesn't enjoy it so didn't drag out the torture long.

Don told me to plan on spending all the next day shopping to my heart's content and eating my fill of sauerkraut (which he can't imagine even putting in his mouth!) as he had things to do at the RV for the day. It was his way of making up for my disappointing experience there two years ago.

We were still sore from our 589 steps (times 2, down and back up again) on our mine tour, but I was up for walking through every little shop in the town at a leisurely pace of course, not having to worry about Don getting tired and bored with the whole process.

So the next day, we had a great breakfast out and then drove back roads for an hour or so. Then I was off for my day browsing Leavenworth.

 

Every shop downtown has lots of hand painting on it and baskets and baskets of beautiful flowers. There was scaffolding on one store and three men were busy doing detailed hand painting of Bavarian scenes on the front.

 

Of course if you are in the market for Coocoo clocks or nutcrackers, you are in luck. I picked up a few small things and had my sauerkraut and schnitzel for lunch. Mmmm!

I was just about to head out to pick up fresh peaches at a fruit stand before going back to the RV when I got a call that Don's dad had taken another fall and the paramedics were there. I gave Don a quick call and we waited for more word.

At 98, Don's dad is amazing. A few cuts and bruises and a bump on the head and he is fine. We breathed a big sigh of relief.

Our plan was to head for the Maryhill Museum, next to the Columbia River, (about three hours away) spend the night there, and be home the day after that.

By evening Don was complaining of being even more "sore all over" and a headache. By morning he was down for the count with a nasty cast of the flu. The tail end of our trip was getting a bit dicey. This time it was his turn to be sick in Leavenworth.

Since I don't drive the motorhome, I made arrangements to stay in our RV space and cancelled the Maryhill reservations.

The following morning, as I was planning on staying put again another day to let Don recover, when "Superman Don" announced that we were leaving. Not only did we leave, but he drove the 6-1/2 hours all the way home without a stop.

We will check out Maryhill another time. He is still a bit green around the gills, but beginning to feel better.

All in all, we had a wonderful, wonderful trip. We saw an unbelieveable number of beautiful sights, but nothing ever looks as good as home...so here we are till next time. We are not sure when next time is, but we'll keep you posted. Thanks for sharing our trip with us.

Oliver, BC and the Hedley Mine Tour

Before leaving Jasper National Park, I need to show you what we do in the evenings. Of course Don does this too, but this picture is of me only because he is behind the camera.

There's nothing like kicking back next to a campfire outside the RV.

After leaving Jasper, we begin our trek toward home. As we approached Southern British Columbia we entered the Okanagan Valley.

This is a beautiful area with a chain of large lakes right down the middle of it. The area is built up on both sides of the valley. They grow an amazing amount of fruit, veggies and wine grapes in this valley. It sort of blows my mind that Canada has a longer growing season than we do in Oregon, but it's true.

The Okanagan Valley has a rather mild climate that is perfect for growing wonderful fruits and vegetables. Peaches I have bought are four inches across and are delicious! The produce is sold commercially as well as in hundreds of roadside fruit stands, open to the general public.

The other side of the valley is also beautiful with hills coming down toward the lake so the scenery is great in all directions.

 

Wineries are everywhere in the valley and at this point in time the vines are heavy with grapes.

The valley is covered with not only vineyards, but orchards producing all sorts of stone fruits. It is a veritable Garden of Eden.

 

 

Some of you may be aware that we are members of a RV group called, Coaches for Christ, the Oregon-Washington Chapter. We had made a reservation at a RV park in Oliver, BC a week or so before arriving there.

When we pulled up to the RV park, we were surprised to see a sign out front that said, "Welcome Coaches for Christ" The British Columbia Chapter was holding a rally at the RV park where we were staying.

We knew one of the couples because although they are Canadians, they are also members of the Oregon-Washington Chapter. Well, the group welcomed us with open arms and we spent as fantastic weekend with them, making new friends who we felt like we had always known.

They had already heard about Don's Nicodemus performance at the Redmond FMCA Rally last month from the Don and Diane Taylor, the one couple that we knew who also attended the Redmond, Oregon rally, so they asked him to do it there for them.

However, as Don got ready to perform, he discovered that his staff, that is part of his costume, was missing. It probably got left at home after the Redmond rally.

Anyway, needing a staff, so Don Taylor went back to his RV, took one of Diane's broom handles, a shower head and a roll of masking tape and very quickly built a staff. Don (Foster) then rubbed it down with coffee grounds out of our coffee pot to give it some character, and a brand new staff was born. It worked great.

His performance was very well received and they are a wonderful group of people and we felt so greatly blessed by all of them.

On the Saturday that we were in Oliver, we drove an hour and a half up the road to a tiny historic mining town called Hedley. There is an old gold mine there very high up on the mountain above Hedley. We went there for the Mascot Mine Tour.

When we checked out the information on the tour, there was a warning that it might be a bit of a strenuous hike to actually get there.

However, two years ago, on our way to Alaska, we had been in Hedley and looked up the mountain and saw the mine waaaaaaaaaaaaay up there and we wanted to go. Unfortunately, at that time they weren't doing the tours, so this was our chance.

We arrived at the appointed place and boarded a shuttle bus. It took almost an hour driving up a narrow, one lane gravel road with 39 switch-backs to get to the top.

From there, we walked down a steep gravel walkway of about a quarter mile or so. Then we reached the steps. THE STEPS...FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY NINE going down to reach the mine! 589 STEEP steps at that!!!

That is the little town of Hedley way down below, taken from the top of the mountain.

This is a small section of the 589 steps.

This is the last part of the steps down to the mine.

When we were in Hedley, buying our tickets for this tour, the girl selling them, said, "Oh, don't worry. There are lots of landings and benches. It's really quite mild." MILD???? OK, she was a 20-something weighing maybe 110 pounds, but regardless, SHE LIED!!!

Five hundred, eighty nine steps is NOT a MILD hike. I thought I would die! My knees were total jelly by the time we got to the bottom of the steps. The scary part is that what goes down, must go back UP.

Well, we stayed down there a while and our guide and bus driver, Chief Rick, a former chief of the Similikeem band of Indians who own the land, talked about a wide variety of very interesting things concerning the mine, miners and the town that used to exist at the top of the mountain.

We struggled to get some strength back into our legs. There were about two dozen people on the tour. I could tell some of them were sweating out the return trip as well.

One young woman had a 6-month old baby strapped to her chest and didn't seem to be having any problem whatsoever. (I think maybe I am beginning to hate young people who flaunt their youth!)

Finally, a few us began to drag our lead-filled bodies slowly back up the stairs. It took a very long time and I felt SURE I would not survive the process. However, the Chief told us to look out for bears and mountain lions, so there was definite motivation to not get left behind on the mountain.

That is Headley taken from near the mine. Can you imagine the commute this was for miners?

This is the valley from about half-way back down.

The thing I want to say about this mine tour is that in spite of the pain associated with it, (and our leg muscles are still complaining) is that this was a great tour. Not only was it a beautiful trip to the top, but it was just a great tour in general (that is if you don't count the 589 steps, of course!!).

When we got back down to Hedley, I took a picture of the mine from town. You can barely see the mine on the side of the mountain and I zoomed in the camera. Yes, it was definitely a long way up the mountain.

It was a most memorable trip! Want to go with us next time?

Look closely. The mine is there at the very top, right in the middle of the ridge line.

Golden and Enderly, BC

We have been traveling for the past couple of days and it has been somewhat disappointing. Not because it wasn't beautiful scenery flying by because there was, but because the weather has not at all cooperated. The clouds have been low and it has been raining on and off.

Today we had trouble finding an RV park close to the main road near Enderby, BC and so we were referred to one...oh, shall we say, "Off the beaten path?" Yes. We will definitely say that! Then, in the process of finding the park, our GPS decided to play games with us, so it got really interesting.

When we finally did locate the park, we discovered it was so far back in the boonies that there was no cell phone or Internet service. After getting the RV settled, we had to drive several miles back the way we had come, in order to get a cell service and call to check on the developments concerning Don's lost cell phone. It's still lost and the new one has not been delivered as promised. Maybe tomorrow.

However I have discovered that if I park the car next to the RV park's office, sit in it to type, I can access their Internet. Great!!

So, because I want to blog, I proceed to download my latest pictures (mostly of cloud-covered mountains). Now it's my camera's turn to give me a headache.

Instead of downloading just the pictures that I have taken since the last download like it has done every day of this trip so far, it decides to download everything I have taken on the ENTIRE trip, 1000+ pictures.

That means I would have to manually go through and delete about 980 or so of them. No, thanks! I don't know if this means I need a new SIM card or if it is just giving me a hard time. What it DOES mean, is, "No pictures in the blog today," at least till I figure out what is going on.

In between episodes with the lost cell phone and the ornery camera, we did go even further up the back road where the park is located because the park manager said there was a lake up there with a good restaurant.

It turned out that there was a huge lake there, lots of homes, condo's, RV parks where people paid huge amounts of money to buy a spot of dirt to park their rigs, a golf course and an air park.

We weren't sure what the major attraction was that warranted all of this so discussed it with the waitress. It seems that nothing is regulated up there yet. Fishing is incredible (We saw one person bringing in several huge salmon weighing more than 20 pounds each when we stopped by the lake store.)

There is also boating, snowmobiling, of course the golf and almost anything else you want to do without government interference there. So for that, people are willing to pay big bucks, fly their planes in and play all summer long. It was an interesting scenario.

Tomorrow we will be going to Oliver, British Columbia, in the south part of the providence and wait there for, with luck, Don's new cell phone to arrive. It is a beautiful area (as all of BC that we have seen is) and is a major fruit and wine producing area. In the meantime, I will try to sweet talk my camera into cooperating with me...or just go buy a new SIM card...whichever works.

Jasper-Day 2

Today is a rainy day. Cold and rainy...and it didn't get off to a real good start. To begin with Don spent an hour on the phone trying to get his lost cell phone shipped, #1, to Canada, and #2 to a RV park where we will be staying in a few days.

It was really frustrating, because after he would spend a lot of time going through all the automated stuff and finally reaching a live person, the call would drop off and he would have to start all over again from scratch. This happened FOUR TIMES. One right after the other.


Finally, after getting a supervisor on the line, he got the call completed and hopefully the phone will be delivered to the RV park tomorrow. The park is supposed to call us when it arrives. Stay tuned on this one.

An hour later, it is still raining and still cold. We decide to drive to see a couple waterfalls not terribly far from here. It was a fairly short walk from the car to the falls and we realized it was one of those wet, bone-chilling kind of days when a hike was definitely NOT going to happen.

However, the falls were quite impressive. Both falls were on the Athabasca River. The first was Athabasca Falls.

Again, we are amazed at the turquoise color of the water caused by the minute rock particles from the glaciers called, 'glacial flour.' Of course when the water is thundering (and it DOES thunder) down the face of the falls, it is white, but when I turn around to where it is flowing more smoothly, and once again it is this beautiful blue-green.

After this we went down to Sunwapta Falls. It was a little bit longer and much steeper walk down to the falls, but once again it was a huge thundering of water.

There were also signs about how people get careless (or crazy) and every year a couple people go over the falls and of course, don't survive. Hard to imagine anyone would do that, but obviously they do.

/

Still not in the mood for a hike with the cold rain coming down, we saw a lake on the map on the other side of Jasper and decided to explore that.

On the way there we were stopped by two more 'Sheep Jams.' This time larger groups of sheep.

One group had 35-40 sheep in it. They were on both sides of the road, getting drinks out of the lake and then strolling across the highway and climbing the rocks on the other side...which they apparently thought they owned as whenever they decided, they would just walk across the highway and it was 'Driver Beware.'

By that time we determined that this particular lake was not especially interesting and we were still chilled, so we opted to go back over to the Jasper Park Lodge where they have a roaring fire in a huge fireplace for a latte and onion rings. So we kicked back there for a while before heading back to the RV.

On the way back we did see a couple cow elks, but nothing as spectacular as the bull elk from yesterday.

I took a picture of the front of the lodge. The roof line is completely lined with huge baskets of blooming flowers. And of course there are enormous flower baskets hanging everywhere. It is really pretty, but I keep wondering who has to water all of them.

Right now it is 4:15 pm and the sun is beginning to break through and the rain has stopped. Don has built a campfire and we are sitting by that for a while.

Tomorrow is another travel day. We are leaving Jasper National Park and driving through Yoho National Park to Golden, British Columbia.

I had never heard of Yoho Park before this. It is a fairly small park and except for the Trans Canadian Highway 1 that dissects the park, there is only a couple other roads within the park, and those are fairly short. Since we will be driving the big rig,

I don't imagine we will be stopping for much till we get to Golden, but I will be hanging out the windows to take any pictures I can get...weather permitting.

Jasper-Day 1

OK, folks, fasten your seat belts. I just downloaded 211 photos from my camera. Relax. I'm not going to post them all.

First we got up early to leave Banff to a rainy day. My thought was that this was going to be a nothing day as far as pictures and blogging goes. (Did you notice that I DIDN'T blog last night? I know my dear friend Geri noticed and will no doubt scold me for that...) So I took a couple 'rain on the road' pictures to show you what a disappointing trip we were having on the drive from Banff to Jasper.

 

However, the rain and cold brought the snow level down low on the mountains and also spit at us as we drove into high elevations. We were driving the Icefields Highway, and eventually the clouds began to lift and the scenery improved...a lot!!

 

...And then came the glaciers...lots and lots of amazing glaciers in the mountains easily visable from the highway.

 

 

There are a lot more I could show you and I may, as we go back down this highway in a couple days. Hopefully it will again be a blue-sky day to make it even more spectacular.

We didn't do much last night except deal with Don's lost cell phone (Complicated, especially when in another country!) This morning broke again cold, damp and cloudy.

We went out for breakfast and this day quickly became our wildlife day. Right after leaving the RV park, we came across a couple of elk.

One was a huge bull who had eyes only for the cow elk that was several yards further into the woods. Because it is rut season, these big guys can be kind of crazy so we stopped the car, but I was not going to try to get close to this one.

He didn't much like the cars so he had his back end toward us most of the time, however, at one point he turned around and bugled for his intended bride.

 

It was a spectacular moment to see and hear. He extended his neck and let out this high pitched, "Oh Eee eeeeee!" (That's probably not an exact translation, but it's the best I can do!) Unfortunately he was moving and the picture is a bit out of focus, but I wanted to share it anyway.

After a breakfast which overlooked a river, where we watched several deer coming down to eat and drink, we headed off in a drive to Maligne Lake. (Pronounced Mal-een.)

On the way we saw a turnoff for Maligne Canyon. We really hadn't planned a hike for today, just sort of left that option open. Well, Maligne Canyon was a hike...and then some.

An incredible place. Best described, I believe, as a deep crack in the ground (actually in the rock) with a fast moving stream flowing through it. It was very deep and very, very narrow, like nothing I have ever seen.

It was hard to photograph to get a picture that looked anything like what it really was, and it involved a hike going seriously downhill. There were even stairs on several parts of it.

Of course, then there was the inevitable return trip, U-P H-I-L-L. Suffice it to say it was a brutal hike, not long, but quite vertical.

 

Then we drove on and eventually come to Medicine Lake and later on to Malgine Lake.

On the way back we came across a "Bear Jam." That's where traffic is stopped, clogging the road because a tourist saw a bear.

When we got there, there were only a couple cars and I wasn't about to get too close to a hungry bear, so once again, the picture isn't great. He was just below the edge of the road. But it's a bear eating berries. Thankfully for some of the people who got quite close, he was pretty interested in his berries.

There is another high end lodge here, the Jasper Park Lodge. We enjoy seeing great lodges, and since we had visited the ones in Banff and Lake Louise, we went to this one as well. It was on a beautiful lake but I was not as impressed with it as with the other two. I did get a nice picture of a bear family there.

We were ready to call it a day, still recuperating from our 'hike,' so headed back toward the RV.

It was then we came across two groups of big horn sheep with eleven in each group along side the highway.

There was a rock outcropping and they blended in so well, it made it really hard to get good pictures. It is no wonder they like to hang out there as it provides good cover for them.

Within moments we had a 'Sheep Jam' going, but we did get some pictures anyway.

Don wanted me to tell you we climbed a mountain to get these pictures, instead of seeing them on the side of the road. Unfortunately the picture with the road sign was a dead give away. Sorry, Don.

Two baby big horn sheep on the hillside. All together now, say, "Awwww!"