Leavenworth!
Monday, July 13th, 2009On the Fourth of July weekend, Patrick, Sara and I decided to go on a biking camping trip near Leavenworth WA. It was an excellent trip! We drove out on the Thursday evening and we had our choice of campsites, apparently everyone was waiting till Friday to take their holiday. This unfortunately meant that all the mosquitoes could focus their attention on us! After choosing our campsite and getting out of the car to set up our tents we were assaulted! Patrick got 12 bites just on one hand! Since it was already late we just made a fast retreat to our tents!
In the morning we made pancakes on the camp stove! I brought the cast iron since we didn’t need to hike it anywhere and it’s MUCH better for distributing the intense heat of an MSR camp stove that has two settings, burning inferno, and off. Pancakes were a HUGE success! The last time I tried to make them on a camp stove we ended up just cooking the whole bowl of batter until it thickened into something edible, because they would just burn and stick too much. It was pretty grosse!
Action photo of Sara fending off the mosquitoes!
YUM! Pancakes!
We made several retreats to the car while we were organizing to depart on our bikes since the mosquitoes were still being vicious. We followed this bike route . We camped at Tumwater campground, marked on the map and headed clockwise around the loop. The mile directly north and south of the campground are the least good road as the shoulder is not particularly wide and there was some gravel but the other 38 miles were great! We saw several other cyclists. There was only one hill that was of any significance, and the scenery was great! We stopped at Napeequa vineyard for their tasting. They hanging the open sign as we passed, so we couldn’t pass them by. They had excellent wine! We particularly liked their rose and desert wine but alas with a full day of biking in the sun we couldn’t take any wine with us. We continued on our way to the little town of Leavenworth. This town reinvented themselves as little Bavaria at some point in their history. It’s a cute little town, they get it just right. With the mountains in the background and a lot of genuinely interesting things going on around town its a nice place to visit.
We arrived about 2pm and really hungry! We first gorged on the pound of fresh cherries we had with us then found a restaurant for lunch. The waiters were all in Bavarian costumes, and the food quite good! We tried a few more wine places, including Maison de Padgett, Ryan Patrick, and Kestrel Vinters. Each place had a different style of wine, and in between tastings we napped in the park, wandered through the art market, went to the chocolate stores, the cheese stores etc. There was also a public park behind the downtown were many people were rafting and swimming! It was very hot that day and we were quite tempted to jump in ourselves but the banks were quite muddy, we didn’t have a good way to dry of and there were still 10 miles between us and our campsite!
The last 10 miles were quite beautiful but we at that point were also very tired! When we got to camp we were quickly attacked by the mosquitoes again. Nothing really worked except the campfire smoke. Which wasn’t too bad considering it was a beautiful evening for s’mores, and chocolate stuffed roasted bananas! In the morning we decided to just pack up as fast as we could and head to town for breakfast. We went to a nice cafe and had awesome hot chocolate and belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream! There were a few bottles of wine that we wanted to get after the tastings the day before but none of the stores opened untill 11am, so drove a few miles down the road to a nice pull off by the river. We lazed around and did a little fishing!!! We could see a few TINY fish, but nothing big and certainly nothing biting.
After a few hours we went back to town for our wine and then headed home to seattle for a BBQ with friends and fireworks over Lake Union. We had a wonderful evening playing board games on the porch then strolled down the street for a good view of the fireworks. Happy Fourth!