Weird day trips from Seattle

The strangest Seattle finds are often a short drive out. These 14 day trips — Northern State Recreation Area (Northern State Hospital ruins), Manresa Castle, Odds & Ends - A Curiosity Shop and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.

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Northern State Recreation Area (Northern State Hospital ruins) Northern State Hospital opened in 1912 as a mental institution on grounds landscaped by the Olmsted Brothers,… Sedro-Woolley, Washington
Manresa Castle Built in 1892 by Port Townsend's first mayor, Charles Eisenbeis, this 30-room brick mansion later served as a… Port Townsend, Washington
Odds & Ends - A Curiosity Shop A downtown Olympia curiosity shop billing itself as a place to make your house a haunted home with sustainabl… Olympia
Earth Sanctuary A 72-acre nature reserve and sculpture garden on Whidbey Island laced with sacred-geometry structures scatter… Langley, Whidbey Island
Recycled Spirits of Iron (Ex Nihilo Sculpture Park) On the road toward Mount Rainier's Longmire entrance, Dan Klennert spent years welding scrapyard junk into a… Elbe, WA (near Mount Rainier)
Dick and Jane's Spot Artists Dick Elliott and Jane Orleman have been encrusting their corner house since 1978 with thousands of re… Ellensburg, Washington
Goldmyer Hot Springs Tucked deep against the Alpine Lakes Wilderness about 25 miles past North Bend, these are wild geothermal poo… near North Bend (Alpine Lakes Wilderness)
Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve A prairie southwest of Olympia is rippled with hundreds of grass-covered domes a few feet high, stretching ac… near Olympia (Littlerock), WA
Wheel-In Motor Movie Running continuously since 1953, this is one of only five surviving drive-ins in Washington and arguably the… Port Townsend, WA
Goldendale Observatory State Park On a 2,100-foot hilltop north of Goldendale sits one of the largest public telescopes in the country, a 24.5-… Goldendale, WA
Marsh's Free Museum This free, crammed-to-the-rafters curio shop on the Long Beach peninsula is home to Jake the Alligator Man, a… Long Beach, WA
Iron Goat Trail / Wellington Ghost Town This gentle railroad-grade trail follows the abandoned Great Northern route over Stevens Pass to the ghost-to… Stevens Pass (near Skykomish), WA
Northern State Recreation Area (former asylum grounds) This sprawling recreation area sits on the grounds of the old Northern State Hospital, a mental institution t… Sedro-Woolley, WA
Ape Cave Lava Tube Formed about 2,000 years ago by lava streaming down Mount St. Helens, Ape Cave is the longest continuous lava… Cougar / Mount St. Helens, WA