Real estate agent and longtime creative Sam Wiener never predicted she would end up in Portland—let alone her entire family.

“We’re from New York,” she says, “until the end of time.”

But she’d always had an eye toward adventure, and the world was calling. After growing up on Long Island, “I moved to Buffalo, New York, then I moved to Brooklyn, then I moved to Manhattan,” she says as she hands me a mushroom-bedecked tumbler of water. “Then I moved to Austin, then I moved to L.A.” At that time, she was working in visual merchandising for Patagonia.

So when the company offered her a position in Portland, she was open to another shift—even though she’d never been here before and didn’t know a soul in town. She’d moved to Austin under similar circumstances.

“I kind of liked the uncomforta

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