Wednesday, August 19: Today was my birthday and it turned out to be a very enjoyable day. We took a bit more time to appreciate the town of Winthrop this morning. Breakfast was on the deck of the Duck Brand Hotel with a view overlooking the town. Then we strolled up and back the couple of blocks of town browsing the small shops.

We headed out of town about 11:00 and noticed a new fire to the East of town. Unfortunately we learned this evening that several firefighters lost their lives fighting that fire today. The main fire area that has been in the news was about 30 miles farther on our route at Chelan Lake. I had checked online to make sure it was OK to travel through that area and that there were not any roads closed that we would need to take. Most of the area was obscured by smoke but we did not see any of the actual fire.

Once we were about 20 miles beyond Chelan the skies cleared quite a bit. We stopped at an apple orchard in the Wenatchee Valley and purchased some famous Washington apples (and a huge yummy looking peach).

We stopped in the town of Wenatchee for lunch and decided we had enough time to drive up to Snoqualmie Falls. The falls were beautiful … great to see an area where the water was still flowing nicely! After viewing and capturing stills and video of the falls we had a snack of ice cream sandwiches and lemonade in a beautiful picnic area by the falls.

On the way to the falls I noticed an outlet mall and we stopped there on the way back through. I was able to get a little shopping in at my favorite clothing shop - Christopher and Banks - and found several items for my birthday present.

We closed out the evening with dinner at Applebees and returned to our camper at the Riverbed Campground.