Olympia, Washington was incorporated way back in 1859, and you can still see a few vestiges of its carless past in the victorian decor of some downtown buildings (Wikipedia, 2025). However, like many West Coast […]
During the depths of the Covid pandemic I explored random back roads. For example, one Sunday close to sunset I came across a large building whose front yard was filled with rusting old cars. A […]
America’s automobile culture tends to encourage doing everything fast. However, if you insist on taking your car to the San Juan Islands, you have no choice but to slow way down. That’s because you can […]
How small is the hamlet of Skamania? So small that its focal point appears to be a general store that doesn’t have much food, there is only one gas pump, and the restroom consists of […]
Humboldt County, California is so beautiful that I have thought about retiring there. However, I haven’t for one big reason: You tend to have to do a lot of long-distance driving to get your basic […]
Once you get past the strip development near Interstate 84, driving through The Dalles can seem like a movie set for the 1930s. Or the 1880s. Or, if you check out the petroglyphs a few […]
Prior to the automobile, Lake Quinault was a remote area mainly populated by the Quinault tribe and a few Anglo-Americans who carved homesteads out of a dense rainforest. But once Highway 101 was extended to […]
Perhaps the best view of Mount Saint Helens is from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. The facility, which is located on Highway 504 east of Castle Rock in Washington state, is named after David A. Johnston. […]
Last week we talked about how cars are for going places. Remember the slogan Chevrolet used in its advertising: “See the USA in your Chevrolet”? National parks were sometimes shown because they are as American […]
The car-buff media is so oriented toward the gear that it tends to neglect one of the biggest reasons people drive automobiles — to go somewhere interesting. We could talk about that in scholarly terms. […]
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