North Central Washington

Once the truck was repaired we drove to Nelson BC, just down the road from Castlegar, and wandered around a little bit.  It's a pretty cute little town.  We are even less into shopping than we were before we left, but we puttered around the downtown for an hour and browsed some of the stores.
Nelson is considered to be a big mountain bike destination in Canada, so Luke was keen to get on the trails. The trails are supposed to be pretty gnarly advanced downhill stuff, so I didn't expect to get onto any of them. It ended up being a disappointment all the same however. We had a hard time getting to the trails (bad roads) and after two aborted attempts at two different areas we ended up in an area near town. Luke's ride ended up being over 90% dirt road and the one (famous) trail he rode didn't seem to be maintained--there were big trees down that you couldn't ride over and, given you're going fast downhill, are kind of dangerous. Perhaps we just had bad luck and it's a better scene if you know the local ins and outs...

One of the highlights was seeing this itty bitty pirate ship in their harbour:

 We drove to Rossland later evening and when we woke up the next morning the weather was **cold**. It had gone below zero overnight and the high was going to be 11 degrees that day, so we decided to drive to warmer places. So we drove to Spokane.

Spokane is actually pretty cool. They have a number of one way streets (which made me feel right at home coming from Hamilton) and a number of interesting neighbourhoods (also like Hamilton). It's a large city with sprawl--which could be really awful but luckily it's really quite eclectic.

We visited a Japanese Garden in one of the city parks. Here's some photos:

 Details of one of the stone ornaments

 Koi blurred by the water

They have a super fun bike park and number of trail areas. There are some super interesting basalt formations, including the Bowl and Pitcher in Riverside State Park. I love volcanos, so volcanic rock makes me happy.

We drove to Wenatchee next. There are many, many apple and pear orchards in the area. There is also a large Mexican population and consequently a very pleasing amount of Mexican restaurants. Strangely, we haven't gone to any of them yet. We are still in the general area. It's only a matter of time.

We went to Cashmere to the Devil's Gulch/Mission Ridge area. There's a 40km bike ride there that has a 25km descent which takes 90 minutes of bombing down to complete. This photo wasn't taken at this trailhead, but I think it captures the joie de vivre Luke felt on the trail:

It was an 18km climb so I opted to do a trail run on the Red Devil trail instead. It also went up and up, but that seems more doable when not pushing a bike. Here's one the lovely views I had:

The next post will be about Leavenworth WA, where we are now. It will feature some cute photos and details about the forest fire that's currently happening just on the outskirts of town. They are keeping it under control so we're safe and fine...but it's crazy to see all the same.