I write this while sitting in my favorite coffee shop in downtown Lawrence on a Sunday afternoon, wondering: When does it get quiet?

Spring break has started, right? So why am I still waiting in line at the coffee shop? Why am I dodging throngs of people strolling on downtown sidewalks? Why can’t I just walk in someplace and not worry about getting a table?

Isn’t this town supposed to be empty this week?

And out of all these thoughts, a new one appears: Goodness. I seem to have become a townie.

Lawrence’s chief attraction is that it is a university town. As I’ve said before — sorry for repeating myself — KU brings a ton of fun stuff to the city. Concerts. Museums. Arts experiences of all kinds.

And there’s a host of attractions in Lawrence that are an indirect result of the university’s presence here. A variety of ethnic restaurants. Coffee shops galore. The list goes on.

But you know what’s really fun?

It’s when nearly 30,000 students leave town for spring break (or Thanksgiving, or Christmas break, or those couple of weeks between spring semester and the summer session) and we get the town all to ourselves.

Suddenly, I don’t have to worry about finding room in my favorite places around Lawrence. The competition for room is gone!

Except, except…

Maybe it isn’t.

Every summer I’ve lived in Lawrence, I’ve heard the same story from older townies: It used to get real quiet downtown during June, July and August, but it doesn’t seem to slow down quite so much anymore.

Perhaps the same rule now applies to spring break. Just a few seconds ago, a woman walked into the coffee shop looking for a place to sit with her computer. For a second, she was stumped.

“I thought it would be less crowded than this,” she said.

We all did.

Maybe this is a sign of how big Lawrence has grown in recent years. We’re not a big city by any means, but perhaps the city’s year-round population is now high enough that even when the students leave, there’s still plenty of us left to fill up the restaurants and roads.

Maybe we’re not just a university town anymore.

I’m not suggesting that KU isn’t the defining feature of Lawrence, because it obviously still is. But the town now has other things going on, as well.

And what does that mean for Lawrence? Well, it means a lot of things. Mostly, though, it means I have to wait for my coffee.

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