A Trip to Washington State

Good morning, Tina here. Enjoying a trip to Washington State with my inlaws. We have rented a house in Gold Run, which is a little town East of Seattle at the base of the mountains.

Our first priority was visiting a beautiful Washington Park Arboretum as a goodbye to our Mother and Mother-In-Law at a bench which was dedicated to her and her sister and their Mom.

After a nice walk on a beautiful summer day (our bench is after the bush on the right in the shade, I didn't get a closeup) we ate at a wonderful seafood restaurant on the water with the skyline of Seattle in the distance.

 "The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle, and the hills the greenest green in Seattle"

After a wonderful meal my hubby, ignoring my pretty good instinctive sense of direction, kept going the opposite way from what I had suggested and managed to take us in circles around a wonderful old neighborhood with great houses, and we enjoyed the scenery, we just didn't need to see it all twice! He was looking for a bridge which goes over Lake Washington to the East, yet wouldn't turn when I saw the sign for the bridge, so we ended up on Highway 5 which is" not a good place to be at any time of day in Seattle!" (That should be part of the song lyrics).

This is the front of our "cabin" which has three floors and sleeps about a zillion people. This trip it is holding nine adults, and there are actually two beds not being used and several singles sleeping in queen beds alone. If you count the couches and put two people in each double bed you could sleep fifteen in perfect comfort and most would have privacy.

We look right out to the river and have seating on the deck and in the yard beside the river. There is a fire pit too, but no fires allowed due to high fire danger. In fact there are wildfires burning near Leavenworth, the little "alps-like" town on Highway 2 which we went to yesterday.

In Leavenworth, everywhere you look, there are baskets of hanging flowers. One of the visitors sitting on a bench next to me had read the history of the town and he said it was a failing logging town in the sixties, and would have become a ghost town but for a class project at the University of Washington in the seventies which reinvented it as the "german/scandinavian/bavarian/you-name-it" tourist attraction it is now. Very attractive and lot of fun shops and restaurants.

 We ate at a sausage/brat/sauerkraut place where this "tin-man" with the squeezebox serenaded us.

The buildings were all decorated in some fashion. A few of them still looked like the old buildings you would see in any town but most had facades thich had gingerbread or painted stucco, and all had the lush hanging planters or window boxes.

 The surrounding mountains were a bit hazy due to the smoke from the fires which burned close by.

One last close-up of the tumbling flowers. I wish my hanging planters looked like this.

We will be here a few more days, then off we go to find our way home.