It requires a commitment to brave the hazards of the wild along the ancient highway known as Interstate 5. And Washington explorers must not only pierce the depths of lands that lie along the southern shore of Puget Sound. They must also face, incredibly, a journey back in time. But that portion of the journey is by far the most pleasant.

I knew that I had passed through the time portal when I made my most recent pilgrimage to Olympia. My eyes told me so. And a subtle drop in my blood pressure confirmed the visual evidence that my trip through time had been a success. I was standing on one of downtown Olympia’s covered sidewalks, sheltered from the rain, and feeling distinctly that I had comfortably slipped several decades into the past.

It is true that Olympia is the ancient capital of the state of Washington. It is also true that an explorer’s attention is understandably drawn by the city’s majestic capitol building as well as the surrounding structures and monuments of the capitol campus. On my most recent journey, however, I pressed beyond the obvious wonders of government architecture toward the city’s downtown — and straight through its hidden portal to the past.

Downtown Olympia is a pedestrian-friendly matrix of streets and sidewalks, lined with an almost astonishing assortment of specialty shops, restaurants and cafés, and art galleries. And the atmosphere, both on the narrow streets and often-covered sidewalks as well as inside the shops and cafés, transports visitors back to a world at once reminiscent of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. But the process of shifting between the 21st and mid-20th century is far from disconcerting. It’s really quite inviting.

There also may be a subtle bending of space, as well as a manipulation of time, taking place in downtown Olympia. I entered several apparently tiny specialty shops, only to discover that they were not so tiny after all.Browsers’ Book Shop (107 Capitol Way N.), for example, presents a narrow storefront.But the shop’s interior stretches comfortably into the deeper reaches of the building. There, walls lined with books are interrupted by an eclectic mix of chairs and stools for the aforementioned browsers, leading to the store’s deepest parts — where free coffee and tea await. Another shop’s name — Radiance Herbs and Massage (113 E. Fifth Ave.) — hints at a similar expansion within beyond an otherwise unimposing storefront. And, as I had come to expect by now, Radiance is indeed a shop that sells herbs in bulk as well as an array of crystals, natural candles and incense, but it also houses massage therapy and acupuncture practices.

During my exploration of the wrinkles in space and time that permeate downtown Olympia, I passed a guitar shop, shoe shops, jewelry stores, and still more specialty bookstores (one purporting to deal exclusively in tales of mystery), gift shops and secondhand stores. Interspersed among the shops are antique stores and art galleries numbered in the double digits. Examples of the latter include State of the Arts Gallery (500 Washington St. S.E.) and Childhood’s End Gallery (222 Fourth Ave. W.).

Downtown Olympia also is clustered with small and not-so-small eateries, ranging in cuisine from Thai and Vietnamese to Indian, Italian and Mexican. There is also an assortment of small cafés and casual dining restaurants. Landmark venues include the Spar Café — a still-thriving (although under new ownership and renovated) and comfortable reminder of city café dining from the last century (114 Fourth Ave.) — and the Urban Onion (116 Legion Way.)

But downtown Olympia’s best overall feature is in the nature of the time portal that guards its entrance. Unlike other enchanted villages — like Scotland’s Brigadoon, which disappears for years at a time — Olympia should remain open for business for the rest of the century.