Pretty much what Tuolumne said. I'd add:
The Rose Garden at Washington Park is nice. When I lived in Portland I would walk up there and just lay in the grass between rows of roses. So nice!
here
That huge park right in the middle of town (I forget the name now) is great.
I lived in Portland for years without a car and did fine. I would go all over hell and back looking for records and I found the public transportation pretty reliable. My sister lived in Beaverton, and that town sucked, but living in Portland feels better. The brioche french toast and chilequilas at Veritable Quandry are yummy!
If you want records, go to Crossroads. You can spend 8 hours there, easy.
A selling point of Portland for me is the anti-urban sprawl law. So you can leave town and get relatively lost pretty quickly. It's nice not to have to go 400 miles to get away from houses and cars and strip malls and shit.
The cultural diversity is pretty lame. I moved there from San Francisco and felt suffocated by creepy white meth heads some days.
If you have time to check out shit outside of town before you move there...
There are nice sand dunes along the southern coast of Oregon.
http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/siuslaw/recreat ... egondunes/
Once you get farther north, about due west of Portland, there is Oswald State Park:
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_195.php
You can camp, hike (forest), swim (ocean), or day trip here. It's great. I've been lost in the woods quite a bit, and this place was one of my more lovely experiences. The trails are great, and it's similar to Northern California in that you can hike along a bluff, in the woods, while overlooking the ocean. Fantastic.
I camped at Oswald for a week, in one of the $10/night yurts, with 10 or 12 folks, going on hikes every day, it was great fun.
There is a trail to "Cape Falcon" from Oswald that I would suggest you try to find. It is pretty intense:
http://earthrenewal.org/cape_falcon.htm
It may take a few hours to hike to, depending on where you start, but it is worth it. You hike through the woods for a while, then come to a bluff that is covered in thick manzanita, with a maze-like trail carved through it. You walk through the manzanita, which is awesome, onto the edge of the bluff, and the ocean wind gusts against you, and you careen down this little trail onto some volcanic rocks where you can see falcons nesting. It's pretty fucking breathtaking.
A photo from Oswald:
And two of my friends after spending a day on Cape Falcon (this is where we ate)
