deskjed's Profile

Waitsburg is just up the road; I go there often. It's not really such a "cool" little town though, mostly just small and sedate. Houses are cheap, though, so more and more people from California, Seattle, etc are moving in, starting restaurants, etc -- ten years ago there was basically a bar and a diner; now you can have organic greens and local beer and wine.

Really, it is a nice place, just not very "cool" in the sense that people usually mean cool (such as a vibrant economy, an arts scene, hipsters walking around, or whatever). I think that retired people might find it cooler than someone younger. The most interesting aspect is that many of the people buying and restoring the old houses in Waitsburg and other nearby towns like Dayton are gay couples, which is a real novelty in small town eastern Washington -- when doing profiles about them, the local paper is always very delicate: e.g. "Jack and his friend Bob...." or even "when Jack and Bob wanted to retire from San Francisco, they remembered Waitsburg from their summer vacations as children...." with no mention of words like "partner" or "husband."