Hmmm...I'm an hour south of Tillamook (a little over 5,000) and 40 minutes north of Newport (10,000). As you know, the actual RESIDENT population of coastal towns is very hard to nail down due to all the absentee owners of second homes, let alone the VRD owners. Our community north of town (most of it recently annexed) is 24% VRDs, a far cry from what it was when I bought here in 1962 and there were still some of the pea fields that provided peas for the metro-area produce markets. Back in those days, those of us who owned second homes bought cabins, intending to improve them and live there some day, not as an "investment." That's one of the reasons why there's so little affordable housing in our town for all the minimum-wage workers who make it possible for the hordes of visitors to enjoy themselves. Really sad, but at least people here are generous. Where else would your doctor, out for her daily 2.5 mile walk, stop for a half hour to help you shovel topsoil from where it had been dumped along the edge of the road? The closest thing we have to a dept. store (Goodwill) is closed, so it feels a bit more away from things than usual. Because my business is doing marketing and design for sport fishing companies all over the West Coast, I've always done most of my work remotely. In addition, my husband really doesn't like to have many people come to our house, so things don't seem very different for us these days, except that my boat is sitting in the yard because every boat ramp is closed. I still have a couple of acres of old-growth spruce trees that we own behind us, so I have plenty of places to go outside...and plenty of work to do to keep me more than busy.

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