My cousin supervised the water district up there, which is famous from a line of 70's TV ads for Olympia beer ("Oly - it's the water"). Apparently it's rather sleepy - not much in the way of excitement; rains a lot, lot of trees and wildlife and nature, people are friendly and a bit on the hippie-granola/progressive side.

He likes it.

It's rainy for nine months of the year, has good oysters, is the locus of political corruption in one of the most legally backwards states in the union (barely 100 years of case law), is home to a VERY liberal Evergreen State College, and is small and somewhat culturally isolated like all of Washington (including Seattle which has pretentions of being a world-class city.)

It is separated by a thirty-mile buffer strip (beginning with Ft. Lewis/McChord AFB, the largest complex of military bases on the urbanized West Coast) from the Arlington-North Bend-Tacoma megalopolis centered on Seattle, which is equivalent to being in a different state.

Summers are fantastically nice, if brief. The scenery isn't quite as spectacular as the megalopolis, being situated at the tail-end of the enormous mountain-ringed fiord scooped out by glaiciers known as Puget Sound. The ocean beaches are an hour or so away.

People like it there.

Didn't the Olympia area have that baby-eating scare? A lot of people became convinced that there was a satanic cult that kidnapped, sacrificed, and ate babies, although no babies ever came up missing. . .I'll look for it and post a link if I find it.

Just tryin' to help.

(Good access to the Olympic Peninsula, the Mt. Rainier area, the lovely and very deserted Wa. coast, and about 120 min, I think, down to Portland and an hour up to Seattle, on a good day.)

Plus, these gals hail from there originally.

I sorta remembered correctly. . .

Oly's a nice little town to live in, IMO. As has been mentioned, it's pretty sleepy, with Government its main industry. It has quick access to the Olympic Peninsula, Pacific beaches, and lots of other great nature stuff.

It also has a surprisingly active and good music scene, mainly due to the presence of K Records in town. That, plus Evergreen College has resulted in the town having an active underground/hippie/alternative scene. And being only 60 miles from Seattle, if you want to hit the big-city music/party scene, it's close enough to make that doable.

Of course, it is basically a small place, with a fair amount of small-town provincialism. But that's dealable.

And it's got one of the best microbreweries around there: Fish Brewing Co. Amazing beers.

Dude: three words - Batdorf and Bronson. Best coffee on the damn planet.

Olympia is a hip, crunchy, off-the-radar kind of place that has a good leftie vibe and has a great local scene. Definitely worth relocating to, plus you've got Seattle and Portland nearby ifn you need a change-up.

Go for it!

The baby-eating scare was hyped in Oly by a christofascist legislator and he in turn duped some tools in DSHS onto his bandwagon. (I played a minor role in letting the air out of those tires.) See above about Oly as the state locus of political corruption.