Exploring Tacoma and Olympia

Not every day on a road trip needs a highlight reel. Some days are just about wandering — poking at places that look interesting, eating when you’re hungry, and ending up somewhere you didn’t plan. That was this day, and it was exactly right.

My stepbrother and I drove south from Tacoma toward Olympia, Washington’s state capital, which sits at the bottom of Puget Sound in the quiet, understated way that state capitals often do. Washington doesn’t make a fuss about its capital. It saves the fuss for Seattle. Olympia just does its job — legislature, Evergreen State College, a farmers market that the locals are genuinely proud of — and doesn’t seem to particularly care whether you’re impressed.

I liked it immediately for exactly that reason.

South Sound

The drive down I-5 from Tacoma isn’t scenic exactly, but the exits lead to places that are. South Puget Sound country: you’re never more than a few minutes from water or trees, usually both. The highway runs through a corridor of firs and cedars that close in on both sides and keep everything green even on the stretches where you can’t see anything else. This area doesn’t advertise itself. It’s just there, being the Pacific Northwest with no particular effort.

We got off the highway and drove around some smaller towns on the way south. The kind of towns with main streets that still have hardware stores, barbershops with the actual pole, diners with counter seating where the coffee comes without asking. I’m from the suburbs of a major East Coast city. This pace of thing is not my native habitat, but I find it genuinely charming in a way I have trouble being cynical about. People know each other here. The hardware store guy knew my stepbrother by name. That’s not nothing.

What kept striking me about this whole area — and kept striking me for the entire PNW leg of the trip — is the green. I’m from the East Coast. I know green. Mid-Atlantic green in July is deeply satisfying. But Pacific Northwest green is a different thing entirely. Deeper. More saturated. More insistent. Everything is covered in moss or ferns or both, and the air actually smells like forest because it is forest — you’re basically always in it or just outside it. There’s a heaviness to the air here that I found I liked, even if it took a day to adjust.

We ended up at a bar somewhere between Tacoma and Olympia. A Tim McGraw neon sign glowing above the bottles, casting this warm pink-and-blue glow over everything. I have no idea what Tim McGraw’s connection to this establishment was, or whether there was one. The sign was committed to whatever it was doing. The bar was dim and cool and smelled like old wood, the kind of bar that has been exactly what it is for twenty-five years and sees no reason to change. Two cold beers, no agenda, nowhere to be until dinner. That’s a good afternoon.

There’s a specific freedom to exploring a place without an agenda — where you don’t have to see the thing, you can just see what’s there. No obligation to any attraction. No checklist to justify the day. We drove around, stopped when something looked interesting, moved on when it didn’t. This is one of the genuine luxuries of staying with family rather than in a hotel: no checkout time, no sunk-cost pressure to extract value from each hour, no carefully researched itinerary sitting in your Notes app making you feel guilty for ignoring it.

Just driving around south of Tacoma with someone I’ve known most of my life, stopping at bars with country music signs, watching the trees go by.

The Dogs Were Waiting

Got back to the house in the late afternoon. The schnauzers acted like we’d been gone for two years. The silver one did her full-body wiggle — genuinely her whole body, from nose to tail, in an expression of enthusiasm that seemed slightly outsized for a six-hour absence. The black one sat on my feet and stared at me with an intensity that clearly communicated she felt owed an explanation.

I’ve been thinking about what dogs add to a long trip. When you’re traveling for weeks — hotels, trains, unfamiliar beds, always being the stranger who just arrived — everything is slightly new and slightly unmoored. A dog on your lap is instantly grounding. They don’t need context. They don’t care where you’ve been. They’re just glad you’re here now, and that specific gladness is exactly what you need after weeks of being somewhere else.

Eighteen Photos

I took eighteen photos this day. For context: I took 155 on the Montana stretch of the Empire Builder, and I’d take 168 in Seattle the following day. Eighteen photos is a slow day — a day that was more about being present than documenting anything.

That’s fine. More than fine. Necessary, actually.

A road trip that’s nothing but highlights would be genuinely exhausting. You need the quiet days to absorb the loud ones. You need an afternoon in a bar with a country music neon sign and an evening on the couch with two opinionated schnauzers to make the big adventure days feel earned rather than compulsory.

Tomorrow was Seattle. 168 photos’ worth of Seattle. That was not going to be a quiet day.