Paul Goessen photographs semis at Smokey Point rest stop on a recent Sunday. (Cody Ellerd Bay)
Alea, Marlene and Scott Raper give their Subaru Impreza a break at the Smokey Point rest stop on a recent Sunday. (Cody Ellerd Bay)
Tom, a 69-year-old resident of Vancouver, B.C., stepped out of his GMC quarter-ton pickup at the Smokey Point rest stop on a recent Sunday. His dogs, Willie and Hope, were ready for a bathroom break, and Tom and his wife were ready for a lunch of leftover rotisserie chicken. They had just spent the weekend in Wallace Falls at a retreat for Overeaters Anonymous.
Tom (who didn't give his last name because of the "anonymous" part of Overeaters Anonymous) is one of about 1.45 million visitors expected to pass through Smokey Point this year. Located on northbound Interstate 5 near Marysville, it's one of 46 rest stops -- or, officially, Safety Rest Areas -- in Washington state.
Summer will be prime time for these rest areas, and for every visitor there's a story. Tom, a retired rehabilitation therapist, spent his time in Wallace Falls attending seminars and connecting with other people dealing with food issues. He was proud to say he's dropped from 300 pounds to 210 over the past seven years.
Paul Goessen, of Belgium, stepped off a tour bus and headed straight to the separate truck parking lot, where he stood gaping at the large semi trucks.
"They don't make them this long in Belgium," said Goessen, a recent retiree from the banking sector. He was with a group of nine Belgian tourists on a 20-day North American trip that hit Vancouver, Seattle, the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone National Park.
Rest-area facts
- Washington state's rest stops are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- All of them have been equipped with Wi-Fi since 2006.
- The country's first rest area was opened in Ohio in 1959.
- Eight hours is the maximum time drivers may spend in a rest area.
- Privatization of the nation's rest stops is federally prohibited so as not to create competition for communities that rely on business from travelers.
As Goessen photographed semis and Tom walked his dogs, Scott and Marlene Raper wandered from the manicured lawn to the sprawling, overgrown grassy area nearby. Their daughter Alea, 7, wanted to try out the new butterfly kite they had bought for her in Tillamook, Ore. The Bellingham residents were returning home from Oregon's Browns Camp OHV Area, where they had been off-roading with a Subaru group in their 1993 Impreza.
"We beat our car for five hours, and now it's supposed to take us home," said Scott Raper, who owns SJRLift.com, a company that outfits Subarus with lift kits for off-roading. "When you go off-roading, you look at a trail and say, 'There's no way you can drive a car up there.' But you do."
The state's rest stops are rife with stories of past travelers as well. At the Ryegrass rest area near Ellensburg, the Olmstead Place marker on westbound I-90 honors a pioneering family that crossed Snoqualmie Pass on horseback from Illinois in 1875 to settle one of the Kittitas Valley's early farms.
On State Route 401 near the mouth of the Columbia River, the Clark's Dismal Nitch marker tells the tale of members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition who remained stranded on the rocky shore by torrential rains and massive waves for six days.
The state's rest areas are intended to make modern travel less harrowing than those early "road trips." Memories and stories, however, continue to be made.
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