Seattle to Grand Coulee Dam
I've never seen such a variety of landscape in one day. You'll see.
We started by driving to Everett, where Route 2 starts officially. This could have been a half-hour cruise up I-5, but we opted for the pre-Interstate route, and took 99, over the Aurora Bridge (the one with the troll underneath). Pretty much all the way from Seattle to Everett, the road was lined with motels and roadside businesses, many with entertaining frontages -- a lot more interesting than the Interstate would have been.
In Everett, we found our road, but it was closed for roadworks, and it took three detours before we were finally bowling down US-2; at this point a characterless four-lane superslab.
We came off almost immediately to investigate Snohomish, which turned out to be a pretty little town, offering no particular reason to stop. We were soon back on US-2, just stopping to snap pictures of fun roadside businesses:
We pulled off in Munroe for lunch. Road Trip USA refers to it as a "mile-long gauntlet of mega-malls and fast food joints", but we found it to be a very pleasant little town, and we ate at a nice non-chain diner, where I got the largest portion of chilli burger imaginable. We saw Americans who looked like they could put away a meal or two, asking for doggie bags. I finished mine though. I won't let a chilli burger beat me.
Munroe also had a good independent record shop, and there I bought The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which had been sold out in every record shop we went to in Seattle. The shop also had a wide range of band patches -- a GWAR patch caught my eye, but I would be a fake to buy it.
What we'd expected in Washington was steep valleys lined with conifers, and for this stretch of the journey, that's what we got. We stopped in the lovely little town of Index, little more than a bridge, a post office, and a town hall, overshadowed by an enormous cliff. Pretty.
Continuing East, we stopped in Skykomish for a look around and some petrol. Skykomish is another tiny town, and we just ambled around for a while taking in the views. We bought petrol here. Full tank. $15. Giggles all round.
Next stop was Deception Falls, where <gasp> we actually did some walking. The "trail" on the boards was 0.2 miles; we decided to go for it. This takes you though some forest, to view the impressive cascades. The shade in the forest made it pleasant, but it was still hot and sweaty work getting around.
This is also where the final piece of track in the railway connecting Seattle to the East was placed. A photograph of the "golden stake" being driven in turned out to be a re-staging of the event, made the following day because of bad light on the real occasion.
US-2 then took us over Steven's Pass, through the Cascade Mountains, and lots of spectacular scenery; the sort of thing we'd been expecting. After that the landscape began to flatten out, and our thirsts began to hit, so we stopped at the first opportunity to buy some water. This turned out to be Leavenworth, a run-down railway town which had changed its fortunes by dressing up as a Bavarian village, and drawing in tourists. We didn't stay long, but I snapped some of the buildings visible from the shop car park.
It was pedal-to-the-metal from that point on, or rather, accelerate to 60 then hit the "cruise" button. The landscape moved from rolling hills, to enormous cornfield, to canyon in the space of a couple of hours' drive, without seeing any particularly significant settlements. These were not the kinds of scenery we were expecting to see in Washington. Debbie timed one period of continuous 60MPH cruise at well over an hour.
Our destination for the night was Coulee Dam. It was at a convenient distance from where we started, and we were attracted by the high camp concept of the nightly laser show against the dam spillway. We're settled into the Coulee House Motel, and our room has a nice view of half the dam (we didn't think it was worth paying an extra $10 for a room with a view of the whole dam -- we can go outside to see the show, and a lot of the time we'll be sleeping).
The Coulee Dam is actually more than a screen for a laser show -- it is a vital part of the "New Deal" initiative of the 30s, to tame the Columbia River and irrigate vast tracts of the Columbia Basin. It says here that the Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure in the world, but I'll save that kind of thing until we've been to the visitor centre tomorrow.
So, yet to come tonight: food, and a lightshow.
Steak; Cheese: the meal and the laser show respectively. Actually I wanted to write that before seeing the show -- the book said it would be cheesy -- but aside from a brief Eagle based interpretation of a song about America, it was quite classy. It did try to educate us by stealth, but that's forgiveable. It had some Jean-Michelle Jarre in it as well. OK, cheese it is.