the story of portland

five years ago, in the spring of 2015, i sat caleb down in our tiny chicago apartment and told him i want to start traveling. we'd been married for three years and suddenly i realized i wanted to visit portland, oregon (of all places?). i had never been there. a friend of a friend was showing me photos of her recent trip. i hardly even knew this person, but her photos convinced me that caleb and i needed to visit asap. it seemed so different than anything i'd ever seen. pine trees and a coast and mountains???!

we visited that summer and it was aaaaamazing. we spent two days at the coast and spent the other days in the gorge and running around mount hood. i fell deeply in love with the city and the pacific northwest in general. since that trip we've traveled a lot, but kept coming back to the PNW. we spent time in seattle, bend, vancouver, and again in portland. you get the point... we love it.

when the time came for us to move out of chicago, though, we moved to salt lake city. it wasn't our time to move to the PNW. i'm not going to lie, i was a little sad a move to pdx wasn't in the cards.

i should mention: when we arrived in salt lake city, it blew our minds. we found ourselves suddenly living in a state with five epic national parks and got to settle into a city that sat literally at the base of a mountain range (not like Denver where the mountains are about 3 hours away. i have mad love for my Denver peeps - your mountains are glorious... just far away). oh and there were six ski resorts that sat in those wasatch mountains. it didn't seem real that trailheads were only 30 min away. coming from Chicago, this felt insane. the last 3.5 years of living in utah included so. much. adventure. i had done my fair share of hiking when we moved to SLC, but it hadn't been a lifestyle that we did nearly every weekend. there was a lot to learn: buy the trail runners over hiking shoes, go to the parks in the offseason, invest in microspikes, avoid the rattlers in the summer by hiking at high elevation, and yes, you'll get a sunburn faster when living at 4200'.

life was moving forward. we bought our first home and had a baby and were starting to think about long term what made sense for our family. not just where we were going to travel to next.

last summer caleb and i spent hours sitting out on our deck, sipping tom collins cocktails, and dream about where we wanted to raise a family and buy a house (as opposed to a condo) and truly settle down. for some reason, we both knew that wasn't supposed to be in salt lake city. there is simply no other way of saying why we are leaving salt lake other than it just doesn't really feel like home to us. it's been full of adventure, and epic hiking, and amazing camping trips. but it doesn't feel like home.

i brought up the idea of portland a lot last summer. it took caleb a beat to catch up (i am the dreamer in our marriage, and he is the one who makes sure we won't end up homeless/broke/in jail or dead by doing said dreams. you might laugh, but that is the truth my friend). in october, while i was in dallas celebrating my brothers engagement, caleb called to let me know he booked us flights in february to check out portland again. it had been five years since visiting the city and we were both wondering if it was better than we remember. had we built up this city in our heads to be better than it actually is? i mean, it had been five years since we were there last. the idea of visiting in february was to get portland at it's worst. we wanted the rain and gloom and cold and gray that portland is supposedly known for.

what we got was a luscious green flowery explosion in a city full of charm and character and weirdness and stumptown coffee (my fav). it rained hard our first day there, and the rest of the time was gorgeous. realizing this is probably not the norm, we tried to stay realistic and not get too excited. we literally did nothing that weekend except drive around, go to some shops and restaurants on our lists, visit two churches, and go to parks so august could swing. we tried to learn as much as we could about the layout of the city in those four days and got a rough idea of where we'd want to live should the opportunity ever arise.

reminder: there was no actual way of us moving at this point. no job or opportunity was taking us out to portland. it was an idea in our mind that we were praying about and felt like we should explore more.

but then, three weeks later, we found out we would be moving in three months.

to make a very, very, VERY long story short, we'll just sum it up and say that there was a lot of logistical and personal stuff that happened really quickly. this was not our plan. we would very sheepishly say we might be able to move in october 2020, but realized even that timeline seemed aggressive.

we are immensely sad to leave salt lake. this is where our first child was born! this was where we learned how to ski. this was where we bought our first home. there was a lot of growing up that happened here. there were countless adventures that happened while we lived here.

but portland is calling our name and we are running (sprinting?) at the opportunity. we'll begin calling this city home in june 2020. to say we are excited is an understatement.

now who wants to buy our condo? :)


(photo from five years ago. swimming in trillium lake)