Pre-Friday five.

Five actual reasons why I am moving to Portland (now that I have visited, whereas before it was speculation), in no particular order:

• The transit system? ROCKS. $4.25 gets you all day access to ALL the light rail trains (which run from the airport to a lot of other places), ALL the buses (of which there are many) and ALL the streetcars (all two of them). ALL DAY. LESS THAN $5. For reference, take a one-way ride from SFO to Berkeley on your friendly BART train. Or use this example: it cost me $6.25 just to get home from the airport via public transportation (bus - rail- bus). And my money was only good for one ride on each of those.
  
• Oh and also, the bus drivers are soooooo nice. I made it a silent mission to find a mean bus driver but there were none to be found, even in the Tenderloin-y parts of town.
  
• The brewpubs? ROCK. I am not even a huge fan of beer, but I fell in love with my new best friend the Great Divide Oak-Aged Yeti (from Denver, but I had it in Portland)... at least I think that was it. After a couple, who can remember the name? But every one of the pubs we visited had locally grown ingredients, and that just might be reason #3.5.
  
• The Hawthorne District? ROCKS. A Parkway-like theater, a couple music venues, a lot of coffee shops and bars and restaurants and a Noah's and a Fred Meyer. Now how much would you pay... Not to say that the NE and the NW aren't cool as well. Just a little too much like where I live now, and the whole point of this is change, right?
  
• The weather? My kind of weather. Cloudy, overcast, cold, now and then a drizzle, now and then an hour-long shower, and then the sun comes out for a little while and goes back in. Much like Colorado weather.
  

And, of course, assuming I get a decent paying job... the price is so very right. I looked inside a couple of apartments and looked at the outsides/surrounding neighborhoods of a LOT of apartments, and yeah. The price is right.