Jennifer Mitol, I lived in portland for a few years, and work has brought me back there once or twice a year since then, so I've seen it evolve. I'm ignoring all smaller northwest cities like Bend because in my opinion they would suck to live in, small towns, oppressive as heck, and just boring. If you move to portland and take some trips and find a small town like bend or eugene and find you like it, fine, but I'd never move there to start with, you'll almost certainly regret it, unless you want very little from your town. Portland is filled with people just like you, fleeing from various states in that region and wanting to live somewhere more progressive but not too urban.
Here's the points: portland is the BEST biking city in the USA. Bar none. Others now come there to study how they are developing their infrastructure. It gets better and better by the year, they are dedicating more and more resources to it, and portlanders are biking in higher real numbers than ever. This quality biking has led, of course, to a mushrooming of the biking scene, good bike shops, coops, messenger/delivery companies, etc, which leads to even better biking.
Portland has a true peak oil task force, and is actively engaged in aggressive rezoning to attempt to be one of the cities, one of the very few, I might add, that will not totally fall apart as oil supplies grow short and prices high. Many bpl probably have no idea what this means or why it's a critical component for any city that plans on existing in the future, but portland has a lot of people who understand that if you don't prepare for the future, you're going to be very sad when it comes. This alone puts it in a tiny list of american towns who are actually taking the steps required to move into the future with hopes of success.
Portland now allows local ag, like chickens, and it's part of a national movement to localize. It's also surrounded by rural area that is increasingly being farmed by young farmers who don't believe the lies of aggribusiness and want to create a more sustainable world.
Portland is removing parking places on street and replacing them with either rows of bike parking or small water collecting mini parks.
Portland isn't perfect, it's got some really bad suburban ring sprawl around it, and beaverton is about as bad as any other suburb in the world, but as long as you stick within the core of portland, you don't really need to deal with that part.
They are expanding their light rail, and actively embracing New Urbanism, which focuses on walkable/mass transit development, to increase urban density and decrease alienating car use.
From being a relative wasteland re food and eating out, they've gone to becoming somewhat of a foodie mecca, not probably as good as San francisco or NYC, but very good still.
It's still a small city, not a major urban area, but it's just big enough to not suffer from the problems of smaller towns/cities.
I could go on, but the positive list grows every year, and tempts me to move back almost every visit I make there.
One last thing, the cascades are not 90 minutes from portland, I was on the trail 30 minutes from portland, about, at multnomah falls, that trail led to pct eventually, which means, 30 minutes from portland, you can start walking and not stop for 1500 or so miles.
Also, totally ignore that talk about portland being wet or rainy, what it does there most days in winter is drizzle. We went day hiking all the time in the columbia gorge in winter, it's fine. Most true native portlanders can be detected because they don't usually wear rain gear. And virtually never umbrellas. A nice thick wool coat is usually all you need, or a nice water resistant fleece jacket. My normal bike trip there would involve me getting damp, a dampness that vanishes when you arrive to where you were going. Like anywhere, it also gets real rain, so I used fenders and had full rain gear for those days, which is really not a big deal either.
East Oregon is high desert, dry, and ranching country, it's not a very nice place to visit but it is worth it just to see it, but there's virtually no interaction between the more lush coastal strip and the eastern part, so that's not relevant to any decision you'd make re moving there. That's sort of like worrying about Fresno or Bakersfield not being ideal when you are contemplating moving to San Francisco.
Work in portland isn't great, but I assume you're a nurse or something else that makes it very easy to get work, so you don't have to worry about that downside.
While seattle is cool, in my opinion, biking it sucks, it's too dependent on some key freeway type bridges between its sections which leads to really bad traffic jams, and it also has a long strip of suburbs going North that is pretty dismal. In Portland you really never need to use your car, mine would often stay parked unmoved for weeks at a time, which is just how I like it.
Portland is not as urban as Seattle or San Francisco, but it's filled with refugees of states just like yours who came just for the same reason, in fact, it amazed me to no end how often I would meet people from states I'd never even seen before, like Alaska, Idaho, etc, and that's not an accident, portland is the middle ground between a large scale world city like seattle or san francisco and a way too small place like olympia or bend, and if you look at a map of that chunk of the country, you'll realize after a while that there are basically no towns like that, and that's why people flow there.
