Out of Seattle, the most beautiful scenery, hotel searching, North Cascades National park, snow!, winthrop, ending up at Omak Inn, Nepali brother, lowkey night on the floor [Sat 2]

We headed out of Seattle for a short break for the long weekend!

Got our belongings settled out by 1 and headed out at 2-ish, as I remember, from Broadway. The three of us stayed on the back, the two stayed at the front.

Even before we reached North Cascades National park, we encountered the most beautiful scenery I'd seen recent times, and this was after the trip to the Rockies. With the Rockies, you kinda' know what to expect and the scenery meets your expectations. Here I was going with zero knowledge of where we were going so this was extraordinarily pleasant surprise.

I tried to search for hotel rooms at the very last moment, because the plan had been made earlier in the day, but we couldn't find any rooms earlier in the day after talking to about seven hotels and figured we'd make do as things went.

North Cascades National park was beautiful! Green lakes and reservoirs, thick pretty forests, and snow-clad mountains. We stopped at a couple of places on the way and explored, took pictures. Our most exciting photos were taken at the Washington pass area, snow all around us, while we were clad in our t-shirts and shorts. It was quite something to see snow on the ground in July!

We reached Winthrop in the evening and tried finding a hotel room in there, unsuccessfully, after making about sixty calls to hotels nearby. Then we tried to find a place to eat and that didn't work either, no restaurants open. We drove over to the next town, found an open bar, tried to order food there, they'd just shut their kitchen, so no luck either.

I eventually reserved us a hotel room in Omak, an hour plus drive from where we were at. In the end we stopped at a gas station to buy some sort of food, but the guy there said the McDonald's drive-thru in Omak was open so we went there and lo and behold! it was open, one thirty in the morning! It was the most excited I've seen a group be for McD's! We ordered a bunch of food, most of which was wasted, headed out to the hotel, where there was a Nepali brother at the checkin counter who'd very kindly saved the room for us, settled down, smoked up, ate the fastfood, chilled for a bit and went to bed.

I setup my sleeping bag on the floor and slept in it. The only bothersome thing was the floor vibrating because our room was next to the roof with all its air conditioning systems.