I think I probably enjoy my coffee more than the average guy, but nothing like the people here do. They’re fanatical about their cups of joe. Besides your customary coffeehouses, they’ve got espresso shacks everywhere. Whether you’re in downtown Seattle or in the tiny town of Sequim, there’s no lack of baristas at your beck and call. These shacks typically consist of a building about the size of a small garden shed and are frequently positioned just off the road, in another store’s parking lot. The shack has a couple of sliding windows in it to provide you with the drive-up java service and away you go. We took a ferry boat to San Juan Island and while there wasn’t an espresso shack on the boat itself, there was a vending machine with an astounding fifteen varieties of coffee to choose from. In Seattle, we grabbed a couple cups of coffee at the very first Starbucks location. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling being where it all began—perhaps it was the Sumatra.

Up in northwestern-most Washington is the Olympic Peninsula. This corner of the country is diversely beautiful, with its rocky coast, silvery mountains and lush rainforests. The unpopulated shoreline is littered with full-length driftwood logs and packed with tidepools. Hundreds of star fish, anemones, barnacles and clams call them home and you can see ‘em all when the tide retreats. The rainforests are phenomenal. The annual sixteen feet of precipitation has resulted in plants and animals aplenty, some of which have evolved like nowhere else on earth. This list includes animals like the Olympic marmot, Olympic pocket gopher and Olympic mud minnow (they didn’t get too creative on the naming, okay?). Commonplace plant species have taken a hankering to this area too, only they tend to grow larger than their typical stature, thanks to the intense watering. In fact, the flora rules the roost here. Anything that sits out in the northwest climate for a bit, from rocks to roofs, gains a thick wet blanket of mosses and lichens on it in no time.