Living in Eastern Oregon - What is it like? (Hermiston: apartments, how much)

[Radical_Car]

What is it like living in eastern Oregon?
Also, how much do apartments and housing go out there?
And what are the best small towns in eastern Oregon? Towns that have like less then 5000.

[skinem]

Depends upon where you are. You can get as isolated as most any human would want. We lived in NE Oregon during the '90s and there was a "news" story on network tv about the smallest towns in America...two they mentioned were in EO--one of them being Monument...not far from us.
That's another thing...you need to be prepared to drive. Often a long ways. We knew people who wouldn't think a thing about a 2 hour drive to go get a beer and we found ourselves being like that after a while. The driving wasn't tough, just long. (We'd drive to play cards a lot of Friday nights at a friends house about 1 hour 45 minutes away, and usually leave around midnight or 1. Frequently on the drive home, we'd pass zero, that's right, zero cars...if we saw other cars it was usually just a couple.)
Be ready to not have things a lot of folks take for granted...garbage pickup, roads getting snowplowed (unless a local rancher does it) choice when it come to shopping, or heck, in some cases, shopping period.
Housing in some towns can be very tight with very little available. Some places just don't have much available housing. Prices typically are cheaper than on the west side of the state, although a couple of the towns in EO (liike Hermiston) have gone through some "booms" and housing was steep until supply caught up with demand.
Some towns are very poor--rural poverty is more widespread than many people think and it is much more hidden than in a lot of cities. We thought the Appalachians didn't have anything on some areas we saw.

However, you can find towns with housing and services available, but there aren't any places in EO that are going to have all the services, amenities , "culture" , etc., that you'd find in a more heavily populated area.

But, we loved it. We loved the space, the empty, the scenery, the variety of countryside, the weather, the unpretentiousness of the people and made some life-long friends.

You can get as rural as you want or find a small college town in EO that IMO, is a really nice balance between big cities and nowhere...

Best small towns? You might need to be a little more specific about what you're looking for.

[Radical_Car]

Ya, my grandma lived in a town in southwest minnesota that didn't even have 300 people and she had to drive like a half hour to get gas.
I'm 17 and going to be a Junior in high school, and ya I always wanted to just live out in the middle of nowhere like that where stuff is 2 hours away, but in reality I don't know if I would like it, maybe at first but after a long time it could get old, maybe...
I do love driving, especially through rural areas, and I love the thought for driving 2 hours in the middle of the night and not passing ONE car, I wonder if it would be easy to speed and stuff? I do a lot of internet shopping so as long as I could shop online I really wouldn't need any stores or anything, except a basic grocery store or something like that. I do enjoy where I live now (St. Cloud, MN) there was a gas station right across the street from my apartment, but it closed 2 days ago, but I could walk there and buy an energy drink or a coffee or a candy bar. I could do without something like that because you can order that stuff in bulk online, and it IS cheaper buying it in bulk.
As long as I had internet, id be fine.

Best small town? Well my grandma's town had 2 churches, a building that used to be a hardware store, a bank, and a nice restaurant/bar place. Something like a bar would be nice, but...

And you said you lived in eastern oregon in the 90s, obviously gas was much cheaper then, driving an hour or a few hours for something, it would cost a lot of money to pay for the gas...

Also one more thought I have, what do people do for jobs? Do they drive several hours to work everyday? Well, my dad drives about an hour to work and I know several people who drive atleast an hour maybe 2 to the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro to work. So maybe it wouldn't be that bad...

Another thing that I have been thinking about,
what kind of jobs are out there?

It is hard to find anything for housin out there online, Craigslist only has a very few listings for eastern ORegon, and you can't really go to an apartment site (forrent.com apartmentfinder.com apartments.com) and find apartments in the middle of nowhere, or if apartments in the middle of nowhere exist...

Obviously, you won't find stuff with amenities and culture like you would in a giant city.

Years ago before my grandpa died, we had to drive a couple hours to my grandmas house, and the nursing home were my grandpa was a few hours away, and we would pickup our grandma and drive there. My grandma loved riding in a car if she wasn't driving, because she lives by herself and she always has to drive, and she just thought it was the coolest thing, and would enjoy riding in a car all day staring at the corn fields and wind mills in southwest minnesota... as long as she wasn't driving, lol
I would enjoy that even if I was driving, but like I said, it may get old after a long time.