From time to time I write blog posts ‘just because’. This post is one of those. This last weekend we traveled to Leavenworth, WA for a small mini-vacation. I had been so looking forward to going there: - a small piece of Bavaria snuggled in the Cascade mountains of Washington. (Or something like that I’m sure is in the official marketing).

Well, I have one word to describe Leavenworth: - TIRED. A town that was mass-marketed to the public 40 years ago, and should have had a makeover 20 years ago! And I mean that. If you look behind the facade, everything is dirty and in need of a redecoration. Our hotel was described as having ‘an awesome breakfast’. If awesome indicates one choice of bread (wheat, sliced), a couple of sugary instant cereal choices, pre-frozen and reheated omlettes, reheated frozen ready-cooked sausages, some re-hydrated scrambled eggs, then I guess awesome is accurate. To make things better, on day 2 of our vacation they didn’t have any sausages as ‘they won’t be delivered until tomorrow’. Aaaarrrggghhhh!

The town lives for its skiing season and Oktoberfest so I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on the place considering it was the middle of summer. But…. There’s more.

When we ordered a pizza from the pizza restaurant (which looked like it had recently changed hands in a hurry and was being manned by students interning before getting jobs in Burger King), no real consideration was given to cleanliness or customer service. Still, $21 for a 14″ piece of cardboard dough covered in a couple of slices of pepperoni and a bonding layer of melted cheese seems like a bargain. Of course we could have eaten at the restaurant across the street where we ate the night before and paid over $10 a burger for something that would have been on the dollar menu at MacD’s. (Hmm, maybe the interns had been practicing there too), but we wanted a change. The highlight meal of our vacation was actually not in a restaurant but at a German sausage stall (it had some posh name but I can’t remember what it was). We actually had 3 beef franks and a big bratwurst with all the toppings all for just over $20 and they were all tasty. A small victory.

I guess the shops themselves weren’t too bad when you consider they were geared up for the tourists. Everything was expectedly a little expensive but offered good tourist fare. My main source of complaint were the hotels and restaurants. Apart from the quality and cleanliness (or lack thereof), the problem was the price. Everything was needlessly expensive. Either the prices are expensive because no one ever goes there and they need to make the money, or they’re expensive because they think they can get away with it. Whichever it is someone is making a lot of money because nothing is going back into the upkeep of the place. Shame. It could be such a nice town. Of course, this is just my opinion. I rarely ever write negative reviews about vacations but this time I really felt I needed to. Leavenworth just wasn’t what it was purported to be.

Anyway, rant over, I’ll move onto other topics tomorrow.

PS. I forgot the ‘heated’ indoor pool in the hotel. I hadn’t realized that heated just meant there was no ice on the surface. Honestly, it was warmer in the street!