Last week I visited Leavenworth and if you’ve never had the chance to go you should definitely check it out.  This is a small city in Chelan County in Eastern Washington and the entire town is modeled on a Bavarian Village.

Leavenworth was originally a gold rush town and started to really grow back in the 1890s.  At the end of the century the railroad arrived and enabled the buildup of a healthy logging and sawmill industry.  By the 1930s the sawmill demands fell off and the city fell on hard times and 30 years later almost faced extinction.  The town’s people knew things were not good and around the 1960’s decided to change Leavenworth’s appearance with the goal of building a tourist industry.

Rather than make it just a cosmetic facelift, the whole town rallied round and worked hard to really make a Bavarian village in the middle of Washington, and started to run a number of Bavarian festivals, one of the largest being the Christmas Light festival in December.

Amazingly the whole idea worked and the town became a huge tourist attraction.  This is great as it saved the town, but the downside is that when you go there the place is full of people.  They have these amazing buildings that look wonderful, but you can’t shoot them as there are 400 people outside standing around with cameras (very annoying).  I suspect that if you want to photograph the architecture there you need to go either very early in the morning or late at night!

So when there I started taking pictures of things above ground.  Some came out, and some didn’t.  Today’s posting was of the Schocolat handmade chocolate shop.  I took this picture for Lisa who LOVES chocolate, and as she liked the picture I’m posting it tonight.

Carter and Master Chief decided to get the bino’s out today and do some bird watching.