Admit it: You’ve judged the town of Ellensburg by the truck-stop gas stations and fast-food chain signs you spotted from the freeway. Don’t blame the city for its underwhelming curb appeal; a few blocks off the interstate sits a cozy, historic downtown, the gateway to Eastern Washington. Past the off-ramp district, nearly everything here is vintage. The free Kittitas County Historical Museum sits in its own beautifully restored nineteenth-century building and sells a poster of the dozens of other classic edifices around town. The Clymer Museum and Gallery eulogizes the Old West in paintings of the myth-ridden American frontier; down the road the Olmstead Place State Park preserves a frontier homestead as a still-working farm with guided tours. 

Why do kangaroos have tails? Rex Paperd, owner of Fall City Wallaby Ranch and its 11 marsupials, poses the question in his barn and knows that you’ll answer wrong (they’re not for balance). After 15 years of raising red kangaroos and white and gray wallabies, there’s little he doesn’t know about the hoppers. Visits to his ranch start with a slideshow of the photos he takes of the marsupials’ unique child-rearing, where baby animals grow in mom’s pouch—images of jelly bean–sized kangaroos so unique he’s worked with National Geographic on videos of the process. The guided walk that follows, through the animal pens, is nature at its most immediate. Tours are by appointment only, starting at $100 for five people. Don boots that can navigate a muddy Northwest walk (or wallaby scratches) and pants that can take a little dirt. At this petting zoo, the zoo pets back. 

Bellingham's art spot has plenty of space (and security) to show off photos, natural history, and Indigenous art; its Lightcatcher building by Olson Kundig’s Jim Olson is basically a jeweled treasure in itself thanks to a translucent 180-foot curved glass wall. The Lightcatcher serves as just half the museum; classic Old City Hall is a block away, a stately Victorian relic devoted to history exhibits and a hall of birds (taxidermied ones, specifically). Admission is two for one.

Would you feel better about flying Boeing if you could peek behind the curtain? Views are of the 777 assembly on the Boeing Tour, with no cameras, cell phones, or even pens and paper allowed in this outing. From the Future of Flight center right on the runway at Paine Field, tour takers ride a bus to the massive factory; the 90-minute excursion can only cover a sliver of the biggest building ever constructed (it could fit Disneyland under its roof). Viewing stations are many stories above the factory line, and the complexities of airplane manufacturing can be tough to grasp in the maze of turbines and metal tubes. New materials and methods have revolutionized air travel, so the factory floor has fewer rivets and more space-age carbon fiber; even the aluminum is coated in electric green polymer.

There was a time when only people who worked in industrial shipping knew the Port of Kalama on the Columbia River. But then the McMenamins brothers built a Hawaiian retreat on the working northwest waterfront, next to the town’s totem pole park—Kalama Harbor Lodge—complete with a wraparound porch and an indoor bar made of salvaged telegraph poles. Then the Mountain Timber Market opened next door in early 2024, its airy indoor space lined with spots for vendors. Despite the Pike Place–like red sign that reads "Public Market," this is more boutique than farmers' stands, with shops selling flowers, wine, and art, with bakeries, a chocolate shop, and coffee vendors placing an emphasis on gourmet snacking.

In between the day trip–worthy towns of western Skagit County—La Conner, Anacortes, Mount Vernon—sits Kukutali Preserve, the first swath of land comanaged by tribal and state parks authorities. The 83 acres of Swinomish Reservation waterfront have three islands and stretches of beach. Named for the mats made of cattail that the original inhabitants used to build structures, Kukutali comprises lands that opened as a nature preserve in 2014, guarding the resident bald eagles, harbor seals, and more. Several miles of trail loop through the site, and the beaches are open to hikers.

Maybe the state capital has so many coffee roasters in order to keep the lawmakers from yawning through legislative sessions, or perhaps it’s a result of the waterfront town’s vibrant business district—we pedestrians love a good cafe. Six java producers make up the self-guided South Sound Coffee Trail that links tastings (or “cuppings”) at Dancing Goats, Olympia Coffee Roasting Company, and more. But the brew is everywhere here, like at the uber artsy Burial Grounds Coffee Collective, where even the latte art is edgy. Olympia was once known for its beer, but it might be time for the coffee scene to adopt the famous “It’s the Water” slogan for its caffeinated brew.

Touch just about anything you can reach at the USS Turner Joy, a destroyer turned museum now docked next to the Bremerton ferry terminal. Drink coffee in the mess hall or touch the thin mattresses that line berths in a self-guided tour that is more like a loose maze through the cramped hallways and near-vertical stairs. The USS Turner Joy once carried roughly 300 sailors on nine deployments to the scattered battles of the Vietnam War; it took fire in the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident that began the war, then fired the navy’s last rounds of the conflict in 1973. Docents like John Kieft, who worked on a similar destroyer from 1963 to 1967, wander the halls to share stories of life on the 400-foot vessel. He explains to visitors that he used computers to target the ship’s guns, even way back then, hitting targets 10 or 12 miles into the Vietnam mainland. “Everywhere I look, I see the old stories in my head,” he says.