Leavenworth WA

We have at times, had difficulty remembering the date, the day of the week or where we were two days past but we really thought we'd gone into a twighlight zone when we drove into a small town in
Washington and saw a whole town that looked like this

The town of Leavenworth had a revamp in the 1960s to avoid the fate of others nearby that had become almost ghost towns. The town reinvented itself as a Bavarian village complete with Bavarian style buildings, restaurants selling schnitzel, pretzels, strudel and spaetzle, townsfolk wearing lederhosen, yodelling and blowing alpine horns. Strange, but it seemed to have worked, the town was bustling with tourists taking it all in, including us. The most bizarre thing was in the middle of town there was also an Australian store, yes, downunder, not just a misspelt Austria. I asked the guy in the shop why he was selling Vegemite, crocodile skin bags, akubras and emu jerky and he said "why not?"  which in the bigger scheme of things here is not an unreasonable response.

It was in Leavenworth that we discovered we had only just beaten the fire on the way here, most towns we past are now evacuated. The air here smoke-filled like everywhere in the state I think. The next day we stopped at a town along the Colombia River we had stopped a few weeks back and posted photos of beautiful Mt Hood. We couldn't even see it his time.

Hope you're all well, we're on the home stretch now.