Back from Leavenworth, and boy was it fun...
Note: Stay tuned for pictures and GPS coords since I don't have them yet.
Okay, so we managed to get a room for Monday night so we headed up a bit earlier than we expected. We weren't supposed to leave until late Tuesday night, but our friend got an extra day off work and when that happens you just HAVE to go a day early. This put us booking our reservation at 5 in the evening (very close to booking deadlines and we ended up in an accessible room reserved for disabled people on the first night, though we couldn't tell any difference between this room and the room we got the next night?). Packed and ready we headed out around 12 midnight. Now Leavenworth should be a little over a two hour drive, but we took the scenic route. Rather than taking 97 North off of I90 we kept going on some little road that ran parallel to I90, so we didn't know we were going the wrong direction (that is what you get for following women drivers ;-) We realized the blunder a ways down the road when the GPS device notified us we were going in the wrong direction.
So we flash our lights about twenty times or so, and the girls just think we are going over bumps or something, because they keep going. We slow down, they slow down until we get back into range and then they start going again. They just don't get it that we are trying to get them to stop. We do this for a couple of miles and finally they stop because they think we have a problem with the Jeep, not because they actually realized we wanted them to stop. Again, they JUST DON'T GET IT! Because we are now of course they agree to let us drive. Being as we are almost at the point where I90 switches north we continue down this road rather than turning around and we take the scenic route to Leavenworth that puts us by Rock Island and through Wenatchee (yep we did a big fricken circle).
So we get into Leavenworth at 4 am, completely tired, and we have to get up by 11 to check out and check back in to our new room. Of course the two year old in the room above us doesn't realize this, but I can't fault the child (so I'm really pissed at any parents that might have had a two year old running around on a second floor room at Leavenworth, please contact me so you can give me back my 4 hours of wasted sleep).
Tuesday is a pure shopping day, since it was the bonus day. Of course I would have rathered that we climb that day as well, but it just didn't happen. Leavenworth is an extremely well built little Bavarian style town. They had all of the lights up still which made for a nice stroll closer to night. In the middle of town is a little sledding hill. The place is just cool to stay at. However, they lack good food. Our food experiences consisted of De Waffle Haus (very poor service, they don't know what a vegetarian burger should taste like, and I'm still wondering where my refill on the water is) and some chinese restaurant in the indoor mall (the food was okay albeit a bit overpriced, the owner was extremely/overly informative, but you get all the rice you can eat). The rest of the time we just made food in our room since we had a full kitchen in our resort (very nice).
With a full kitchen you can make just about anything. We went for a lasagna on Tuesday night which turned out very good. Large enough to feed us for two nights as well, even though we ate the remainder for breakfast on Thursday morning in the realization all the food needed to go before we left. Wound up eating lots of eggs on the trip as well, and of course I had to have my Cinnamon Crunchers cereal.
So did we actually climb? Yep, the girls wussed out and thought it was too snowy to climb, so we went on Wednesday and drove around picking out spots to hit. We spent about an hour at Fridge Rock, a small boulder with up to V5 problems. It was nice getting my hands on some real rock, it is actually much easier to hold onto than gym holds because of the sharper/varied texture. We took a bunch of pictures on this boulder and got some GPS coords which I'll throw up eventually. It took us forever to find this place because the locality of the maps we were using wasn't uniform (1 inch might be a mile, and the next inch might be 20 feet). After Fridge, we tried for several more boulders but realized in the snow, we weren't going to be able to get to any of them since most are 100 feet or so off the roads edge. We did manage to get to the Torture Chamber (took us 10 minutes of hiking in 3 foot deep snow), but we didn't climb much. Just admiring the scope of this set of rocks was enough for me. Torture Chamber is about 10 or 15 large boulders that are all next to each other, falling over one another, making for a nice cave, some good overhanging problems, some really nice crack problems, in short we are going back in the summer. We got coords for this rock as well as about 20 others, some of which weren't marked on the boulder guide, so they might be unknowns.
After our climbing experience we got back to the room and figured on doing some sledding. The resort we stayed at featured a HUGE sledding hill on which people were only going about half way up before heading back down. We couldn't figure out why nobody was going from the top, but we quickly learned first hand. By the bottom you are going about 30 mph or more (we should have clocked it with the GPS), and there are two bumps that shoot you about 6-8 feet in the air. Being extremely crazy, we did this multiple times, got some badly scraped up knuckles and some sore bums, but it was a lot of fun. Realizing it was slow going down one at a time and walking back up we grabbed a community sled and took it up. Note that nobody said anything when we grabbed this sled. So we head down, my friend breaks the sled, and some little girl starts crying because we broke her sled. (This is an oh $hit moment coming I'm thinking). So we offer to pay for the sled, no go, we offer to give her our sled, no go (her's was cooler after all). This puts us in a dilemma. We head back to the room, grab the wallets, and head back to the family so we can talk with the parents. Of course the parents thought we were running away, we quickly advised them we weren't, we were sorry and what not for destroying the sled, and how fun the ride was ;-) All is good, and everyone is happy again!
Thursday actually puts us all at the breaking point of tired. Had a hard time sleeping the entire trip so we decide not to hit any more natural rock (especially after only finding two good boulders the first day that were usable in the snow). We just headed back, got in around 3'ish and took a nice nap. Woke up long enough to eat, and then hit the sack for the night.
I enjoyed the trip quite a bit. Plan on seeing more travel journals like this one in the future.