Leavenworth, WA

Last weekend, Atsuko and I made a day trip out to Leavenworth, WA.  It is a small little town on the other side of the Cascades about 120 miles drive from Renton.  The two and a half hours it took to reach it, driving along US 2 through the mountains, was a gorgeous site but definitely out-done by the town itself.  In the 1960s, the economy of the town had taken a hit so a project was started to revitalize the town.  The end result was a neat Bavarian stylized town, geared towards tourism with some great restaurants, shops, hotels, and wineries.  Our original plan was to eat lunch here then go to a wine tasting event, but we ended up just walking around for an hour or so after lunch.

We had lunch at a little place called King Ludwig's Restaurant.  We ate German, schnitzel and sausage with various kinds of kraut and potatoes.  The food was more than amazing.  The coffee I had was really strong!  I feel bad because we were so hungry, I forgot we had wanted to take pictures of what were we eating until we were almost half-way through.  We were definitely stuffed.  We also purchased some amazing cheese and sausage from one of the local stores, and made sure to sample whatever we could.  By the time we got home we didn't even really want to eat supper.

It was a great drive coming back along I-90 as well.  We stopped in Northbend to check out the outlet mall there.  It wasn't really worth the stop, but gave us a bit of time to stretch our legs.  In all, our first decent trip in our new car was great.  We found out we can go over 200 miles on a half tank of gas when driving at highway speeds.  That's great to know if we ever want to take longer trips.  We can also say that our Kia Optima is definitely comfortable too.  I am hoping we can take another day trip soon.  Maybe next time we will go farther and in the opposite direction to see the ocean.

Here's a gallery of some of the pictures we took.

[wp-imageflow2]