Big Hopes for a Small Town
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8/21/2007
We're looking for a retirement town to relocate Northern Calif. & Walla Walla, WA kept popping up on our web & magazine searches so we spent a few days visiting. These are the pros & cons we came away with based on our needs:
Pros - very friendly people; nice downtown with a free concert going on when we arrived; weather was in the mid 80's; 3-4 "new", very nice restaurants; new homes were abundant at approx $250K for 1600 sf; College Park had some very nice new homes with a local Gotchalks & K-Mart (I knew we were in trouble when I got excited about seeing those 2 stores)- few shopping outlets available.
Cons - Even though the downtown has it's charm, there really wasn't much of interest inside the shops - the biggest store, Macy's, was inside the old movie theater; once you got out of town, the neighborhoods, aside from those immediately surrounding Whitman University, had some depressed areas; there was only one public golf course, Veteran's Memorial G.C., that was nice but wouldn't hold my attention week after week; the only other course was Walla Walla C.C. but it was priced out of my budget; there were a few short trails surrounding Bennington Lake (very small) but the terrain had little of interest & the views weren't that great; the back yards in the nice, new homes in College Park were too small to support a medium sized dog; it's difficult to fly into Walla Walla as they're very few flights into the small airport so we rented a car in Portland & drove the approx 4hrs along the beautiful Columbia River.
So those were my first impressions of Walla Walla - they are mine of course & you may come away with different views & ideas about the town - I really did want to love it but just couldn't get beyond a warm feeling for the people.
Joe | San Jose, CA