Traveling the Chumstick Highway, we make our way to the next destination. Washington has quickly become home to some of our favorite town names. In addition to the ones you know and love (Puyallup, Snoqualmie and Wallawalla) there are other, lesser known, beauties like: “Conconully”, “Aeneas” and “Humptulips.” Nice places to visit, I’m sure. For our next stop, however, it’s the town of Leavenworth.

Leavenworth is a festival town. In the month of October, the festival is Oktoberfest. It’s not hard to get into the spirit of the season here. The entire place is decked out in full autumn splendor. Plus, this town has a Bavarian theme year round- its bread and butter tourist attraction. The mountains here, a perfect backdrop to this little city, are beautiful, craggy, snow covered peaks. It’s a really fun place to visit, with Bavarian looking store fronts, authentic German food- and while we were here- lots of German beer, parades, men and women in full Bavarian garb (old school stuff- they don’t really wear this stuff nowadays do they?), and live polka bands. We were assured many times by the band leaders that “You are all sure to know this one!” The band would start and Travis and I would look at each other and shake our heads- “no, not that one either.” There were a couple of songs we did know: Edelweiss, which we did our best to sing along to, and The Chicken Dance -a German invention used to gauge whether or not you need to drink more beer.

Saturday we Oktoberfested, Sunday we rested, and Monday we decided a hike was in order- so we found a nice place to go: The Icicle Gorge River Trail. This is now one of our favorites! It’s a beautiful trail. Four miles, though, so kind of long for our little doggy who gets very sore and grumpy after a couple hours of walking!  But he did get to swim in the river along the way, which made him happy.

We had a great time here- we’ll definitely come back in the Summer or Winter, since there are activities going on all the time. We think it’d be really fun with a group of people, too.  So, who’s in?