I’ve explained in previous posts how at some point, we decided to try to visit all Washington counties. The rules were pretty simple:
- All three of us are together as a family
- We are in our electric car
- We at least drive into the county, but ideally, we find something fun to explore in the area
- If we previously achieved these criteria before we decided to set this as a goal, those counties still count.
I have belatedly created a tag for some of these trips: wacounties.
After all our previous trips, there was only one more left and that was for the five counties in the very southeast corner of the state. If you’ve ever looked at a map, there’s not a lot there. It’s composed largely of dry rolling hills dotted with cows and farm equipment. While beautiful, it’s hard to come up with something to do instead of just drive through.
Further complicating this was the fact that there were no superchargers in that area. My only idea was to charge up extremely high in Pasco, WA and then try to touch all the counties on the shortest route possible up to Spokane to get to another charger. Another idea was to bank on non-Tesla chargers (or a campground, etc) but that makes me MUCH more nervous. So many non-Tesla chargers are broken that I didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a plug in my hand.
Thankfully in May of 2025, Tesla installed a new supercharger in Lewiston, ID! It was still a fairly long run, but it made things a lot more interesting.
We planned this as a 710-mile, overnight trip. On Saturday, we headed across Snoqualmie Pass, down through Yakima to Pasco. We charged there, had lunch, and headed east. Much of our route was along US-12. I have greatly enjoyed all the time we’ve spent on two lane roads as part of this adventure! The interstate is a good fast-forward, but the experience really gets better when we exit the interstate.
When we got to the final county, we stopped to take a photo by the sign.
Lewiston, ID and Clarkston, WA are right across the river from each other, and as you can guess from the name, Lewis and Clark came through there. We stopped at Hells Gate State Park in Idaho to visit the Lewis and Clark Discovery center and play a little disc golf. Then we had a delicious dinner at Roosters on the Snake River and then went back to our hotel. As always, we stayed at a Best Western Plus (not sponsored, but we should be at this point!) and it was probably the nicest one we’ve ever been to.
On Sunday we made the trek back on a slightly different route joining up with I-90 at Moses Lake. We sat in about 30 minutes of traffic for the decade long bridge replacement at Vantage. (I’m exaggerating the project length. Probably.)
As we got closer to Seattle, the traffic got heavier, the drivers got worse, and the rain started up. It was a bummer to think that the county exploration project was over, but I’m so glad we did it! Elijah keeps asking if we’ll try it when we move to Minnesota. We’ll at least keep track but there are so many more counties there that it will be a long process.