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A few of Sal's stories

560 stories
This winery's roots go back to the thirties — and the whole chateau sits on an old timber baron's dairy farm.
Come summer, folks haul blankets and wine onto that lawn for concerts — they've been singing out here since the eighties.
That old brick schoolhouse goes back over a century — nowadays it pours wine instead of arithmetic.
Folks call this corner Hollywood — a lumber baron planted hundreds of holly trees up his drive and the name just stuck.
Right here was Molbak's, the big garden store — sixty-seven years of springtimes till it closed, and the city's okayed a whole new development for the lot.
Molbak's sitedevelopment
Funny thing about all these tasting rooms — hardly a grapevine in sight, the grapes all grow clear over the mountains in eastern Washington.
Two fellas started that whiskey outfit right there — every kernel of grain comes off one family farm over in Quincy.
The Herbfarm there does nine-course suppers — started back in the seventies with a farm family selling their extra chives, and grew into the whole evening-long affair.
The Herbfarminstitution
That's Marymoor — the county's biggest park, six hundred forty acres, with a bicycle racing track and an old banker's mansion tucked inside.
The light rail rolled into old downtown Redmond back in May of twenty twenty-five — you can ride it straight through to South Bellevue.
Microsoft's been rebuilding its whole campus — seventeen new buildings and a footbridge over the highway, a little city unto itself.
Mario's American home is right there — Nintendo's been running the show from Redmond since the early eighties.
PILOT EXTENT · Sal narrates here today Bellevue Cle Elum Everett Issaquah Leavenworth Monroe North Bend Olympia Redmond Seattle Tacoma Leavenworth → Seattle · drive North Bend → Seattle · drive Indian John Hill · rest area Iron Goat · rest area Maytown · rest area Nason Creek · rest area Scatter Creek · rest area Seatac · rest area Silver Lake · rest area Travelers Rest · rest area Cle Elum · town North Bend · town

Someone good riding shotgun — with you, not for you.

Withby is a local voice companion for the drive: live traffic, places worth stopping for, and the story of the road — spoken, hands-free, grounded in real data. Seattle is our first metro.

Sal rides along and talks. You keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road; when something is worth knowing — a backup building two exits ahead, a bakery that is actually good, why the road bends where it does — you hear about it in time to act on it. Ask a question out loud and you get an answer about where you actually are, not a search result. The pages below are the same ground Sal covers, written down: every exit, every rest area, every town we narrate, so you can read the drive before you take it.

Drives, exit by exit

A drive read end to end: every exit in the order you meet it, what is worth stopping for at each one, and how far off the road it actually sits. Distances are measured from the ramp rather than from the town centre, so a detour that looks close on a map does not surprise you at the exit. Both directions are written separately, because the order you meet things in is the whole point.

More drives, in brief

Drives written up as a short summary, the distance and the time, rather than exit by exit.

Corridors we narrate

One guide per corridor we narrate, in the order you meet things driving it. Each carries the exits that have somewhere worth stopping, the stories attached to that stretch of road, and the rest areas along it. Corridors marked live are the ones Sal narrates today; the rest are written up and waiting for coverage to reach them.

Rest areas by route

Every WSDOT rest area on the route: which milepost, which direction it serves, exactly what is listed there, and — the part that matters when you need one — the next one along in the same direction if this one is closed. We list what WSDOT publishes and do not claim a rest area is open, because that is not something we can know.

Towns along the way

What a town is actually worth stopping in for, drawn from the same rows the drive pages read, so the two never disagree. Places are grouped by how far they sit from the exit you would leave the highway at, and a town only gets a page once there is enough there to be worth the detour.

Where all of this comes from

The roads, exits and ramps are OpenStreetMap, imported for this region and routed with pgRouting, so a distance here is a distance along the road rather than a straight line on a map. Traffic is the Washington State Department of Transportation feed, read live while you drive. Rest areas are WSDOT’s own published list, including which direction each one serves and what is at it. Places worth stopping for come from OpenStreetMap, filtered down to the ones a person would actually pull off for and ranked by what is near the exit you would use.

Nothing on these pages is written by a language model, and none of the numbers are typed by hand — every count you see is computed from the rows that produced the page it sits on. Where we do not have something, the page says so instead of guessing: an exit with nothing worth stopping at does not get invented company, and we will not tell you a rest area is open when all we know is that it exists.

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