Here, on the Oregon coast, the tourists just keep arriving. Our little town of almost 10,000 hosts roughly 50,000 visitors most weekends, plus lots of folks who stay all week. That means the residents pay for the infrastructure (fire, police, water, sewer, etc.) to handle all those visitors. Every fourth home is a vacation rental, with many others illegal vacation rentals. Those owners have zero interest in what's done here. We go to the store early Friday and need to get everything we'll need until Monday afternoon, as it's impossible to shop weekends. It takes 45 minutes to drive the four miles of Hwy 101 that runs straight through "downtown."

The good news for me is that I live on forested acres, with deer, elk, coyotes, and birds for neighbors. Although I'm less than a half mile from the ocean, my nearest neighbor of the human sort is a quarter-mile west or east. Every window in my home offers views of...trees! This year's fawns are now old enough to play games of tag right outside my office window.

The real downside of a tourist economy is all the minimum-wage, part-time jobs. Property taxes are high (to pay for all that infrastructure), so high that even some full-time workers come to pick up monthly food boxes from Backpacks for Kids. Every kid here gets free lunch and free breakfast every day, due to the low average income of the parents. Once school begins for the year, we will return to our program of sending food home with kids every Friday, to feed them over weekends when there aren't any free meals.

All in all, in spite of the weekend traffic jams that mean staying at home weekends, and the hikers who appear along our road every day who can't find where they parked their cars (!!), the people who live here are extremely generous and always friendly. I wouldn't trade, in spite of the downsides.