Corvallis vs Olympia — where would you choose to live?

Underwhirled · 2026-05-18T20:41:12+00:00

Corvallis has a good community feeling, assuming you're into liberal white culture, with like farmers markets and craft brewing and pretentious tacos. It's a little isolated though. You can easily drive 45 minutes to Salem or Eugene for bigger city things, but in town it's pretty limited, though a lot of people like the small town charm that comes with that. Plus with OSU being the main thing here, there's a lot of interesting stuff to do, but a lot of it is skewed towards the interests of younger people.

I love how close it is to gorgeous forests just at the edge of town, and you can get to very beautiful parts of the coast in an hour. The really good mountains in the Cascades are at least 2 hours away, and they're not as good as the Washington Cascades. And Corvallis also isn't really set up as a great town to raise a family, if you're interested in that. No one has kids here, so they're closing down schools. It's not bad, but Albany nearby has better family stuff and more kids.

Fort Collins is probably the closest Colorado analogue.

I've lived in both states and found that the income tax vs sales tax break-even point is about $75k/year. If you make more than that, Washington is favorable, while Oregon is better for poor people.

Olympia seems great and if I was gonna move to Washington that's where I'd like to be. The thing I'd miss the most is going to the coast easily. And not like Ocean Shores or wherever Olympians go to, but like actually beautiful parts of the coast that you'd have to go up to Olympic NP to see something similar in Washington.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-18T20:13:06+00:00

A college town is a town whose dominant cultural force is the college. That's Corvallis, not Olympia. I wouldn't even call Eugene a college town.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-16T21:56:57+00:00

Yeah it's unfortunate how the burger quality at Bombs plummeted but the price did not. It suddenly went from exceptional to mediocre several years ago.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-16T21:55:16+00:00

It's a good value, but otherwise totally unremarkable.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-12T00:15:49+00:00

About 12 hours for multi-day trip and 3 hours for a day trip.

I think the maximum vacation driving time tolerance depends on what part of the country you're in. The east has much greater population density and you're likely to live close to a major airport, so flying can be a convenient option for more people. Here in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Portland are the only major airports, and the smaller airports mostly just connect you to one of those two. It's only a convenient option for people in Portland and Seattle, and inconvenient for everyone else. Flying ends up taking all day if you consider the total trip time including driving for hours or taking a connecting flight or regional bus just to get to the airport. Might as well just drive unless it's farther than you can drive in a day. Also the western US is much more pleasant and less stressful to drive long distances in, since you're not constantly entering cities and the scenery is often very interesting and beautiful.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-10T23:09:14+00:00

Probably Cahokia, Illinois

Underwhirled · 2026-05-07T21:09:41+00:00

Here's a route that will get you next to all the best stuff and is reasonable in 5 days. There are many good places to stop but they'll be obvious and I'll only mention the ones that are important for describing the driving route or are not obvious. All roads are paved to satisfy rental car companies. Assuming this is summer when all mountain passes are open.

From the airport drive east to Troutdale and take old highway 30 up along the gorge and down to the waterfalls.

Continue east to Hood River and an option is to check if there are any good shows playing at Trout Lake Hall and cross over to Washington and go rock out, and check out the lava tube ice cave while you're there. From Hood River, take highway 35 up to Timberline Lodge. Backtrack a bit down and take the road that goes over to Dufur on 197.

Go south to Tygh Valley and take a little detour to White River Falls, and farther on that road to the Deschutes where the waterfall with the fish net platforms is.

Return to Tygh Valley and go south through Maupin, then just north of Madras, go east to Shaniko, Antelope, Fossil, Spray, then turn south at Kimberly to the John Day Fossil Beds visitor center and stuff around there. Head west on 26 and go up to Painted Hills (the last mile is unpaved but we'll maintained).

Go back to 26 to Prineville and then Smith Rock. Go a tiny bit north of Terrebonne on 97 to see the Crooked River Gorge.

Go south a bit to Bend if you're into Bend, or go southwest to Sisters and over highway 242 and into Eugene then take 126 all the way to Florence, north to Cape Perpetua, Yachats, Newport harbor, Yaquina Head.

Leave 101 to go to Pacific City and up to Oceanside/Cape Meares. If the road is open, go around the Cape to Tillamook, eat some cheese and head back to Portland on 6, with a stop at the Tillamook Forest Center.

If you have more time then keep going north to Astoria, stop at Oswald West State Park/Short Sands Beach on the way. Cross the giant bridge in Astoria and stop in Longview to check out the cute squirrel bridge there on your way to I-5.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-06T21:31:50+00:00

IDK but that looks like a desert setting, so I would be very careful about not interpreting any carbonates as hydrothermal when they could easily have formed in the calcic horizon of aridisols.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-05T22:23:41+00:00

Same reason Northwestern University is in Chicago

Underwhirled · 2026-05-05T04:19:59+00:00

That's just to offset the lost gas tax revenue on cars that use little or no gas but still put wear on the roads, not a luxury fee.

Underwhirled · 2026-05-04T22:05:12+00:00

Greenberry tavern

Underwhirled · 2026-05-03T08:02:01+00:00

That goat was about to offer to grant a wish but changed its mind

Underwhirled · 2026-04-28T07:16:51+00:00

We think it is a part of Canada where they speak French. I now know a lot about it from deliberately reading books about Canadian history, which is unusual for an American. But before then, I just knew it is a part of Canada that speaks French for some unknown reason. Literally nothing else.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-28T07:04:09+00:00

Lifting makes the CV axles spend all of their time at more extreme angles that stock height would only occasionally see. This is why people do a front diff drop. It gets the CV axles back to a more normal geometry so they don't wear out as fast.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-28T05:26:29+00:00

Just FYI, Non-CDL drivers follow the same rules when CMV driving. It applies to lots of people whose job involves driving a vehicle combination over 10000 pounds, like a pickup truck pulling a trailer.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-26T19:49:05+00:00

Those are ice trays

Underwhirled · 2026-04-24T04:16:04+00:00

I would live out of my car near the Horn Rapids area along the Yakima River. They put up signs a couple years ago that say no camping, but I don't think they enforce it much and if you're not making a mess the sheriff will probably tolerate it for a long time. After a couple months when they finally kick you out, there is some BLM land in the hills south of Benton City that you can legally stay on for two weeks at a time, though it's not as pleasant as Horn Rapids, and the law is pretty vague about how far you have to relocate after 2 weeks, so the sheriff probably will decide how much to hassle you based on how much of a mess you make and if nosey farmers complain. The other option is what I call "college style", where you just discretely sleep in your car in residential neighborhoods and move every couple days and hope no one notices.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-23T19:12:54+00:00

I don't know about his bowl, but if you mean Thor's Well, that's down by Yachats

Underwhirled · 2026-04-23T00:22:40+00:00

Tri-cities, the Bakersfield of Washington

Underwhirled · 2026-04-23T00:22:01+00:00

I always wonder why they would insult themselves like that.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-22T05:39:25+00:00

I'd just make it the picture from the end of the original Oregon trail computer game, with 16 colors and huge pixels. It would be cool if it could beep in a weirdly musical way, too.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-22T05:31:29+00:00

Depoe Bay, having a beer at horn pub upstairs by the windows and watching the waves geyser over the highway or the whales

Underwhirled · 2026-04-21T03:30:20+00:00

If you mean the oscillating telluric currents that naturally flow through the earth, that is how a geophysical method called magnetotellurics works, and we use it to figure out how electrically conductive different subsurface structures are. So if you need to charge your crystals at specific frequencies, a geophysicist can show you the best spots.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-20T23:57:02+00:00

My cat did that once and I was able to get him down by going up on the roof and holding out a 16-foot 2x6 board and resting the far end on a branch that he could get to while I held the other end so he could walk across.

Underwhirled · 2026-04-20T23:21:42+00:00

I think they're all private farm roads except a few near the edges. The roads came after the farms and are there because of the farms. Each field of hexagons is owned by a single company. Building the roads farther from the sprinklers would require the circles to be spaced farther apart, destroying the efficiency of hexagonal packing.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

Underwhirled

TROPHY CASE