My husband and I spent last weekend in Portland, visiting with a large number of family members gathered to celebrate my dad’s birthday. But we were also there to help younger daughter Jenny prepare for her move there following her graduation from Loyola University in Chicago in May. Having enjoyed living in the land of extensive and efficient public transportation for the last four years, Jenny must now purchase a car to get her around town — and out on a few of the road trips she loves so much. Portland has a light rail and bus system, but it’s nothing to rival the CTA. And, too, a suitable apartment had to be found.

Born in Idaho and raised in Washington state, Jenny has never lived in Oregon, yet she is no stranger to Portland. Both her dad and I were raised in that city, and we still have lots of relatives in the area. Jenny has spent extensive holiday and vacation time there since she was a baby, so she is excited about moving there and discovering all that the Rose City has to offer. Nevertheless, when it came time to explore neighborhoods for apartment complexes, she didn’t have a clear idea where most were and how easy it might be to get from there to one of the hospitals where she might find work.

She’s spent the last few months scouring websites for possibilities. Certain amenities were a must (in-unit laundry facilities for one; no more hoarding quarters and trudging down multiple flights to a dingy laundry room!), and of course she had a limit on the rent. As with so many things these days, the Internet has made relocating to a new city much easier than in the “old days” (like when I was Jenny’s age). Not only did Jen check out a slew of apartment complexes on their websites, she then found sites which provided ratings and comments by people who’d actually lived in them. She gave a lot of weight to those when whittling down her choices of which places to visit, nixing those that perhaps had pretty pictures and enticing prose on their sites but which received low scores from former and current tenants. That wasn’t a totally fail-safe system; we visited one complex which had received really great ratings but whose units were at least 40 years old, looked like they had never been updated and had ant traps scattered about — no, thank you!

Jenny had also used her laptop to investigate a number of car models, checking out safety ratings, gas mileage and the all-important how-cute-is-it factor. She knew which manufacturers were offering zero-percent financing and rebates for graduates, and by the time she and Dad hit the dealerships on Sunday, she had narrowed her choices to three. Just as with the apartment hunting, though, she realized that the computer can give one only so much information. After navigating the test drives and conversations with salesmen and finance managers, the picture was clear, and (with Dad cosigning the paperwork) she became the proud owner of a shiny new car.

By late Monday, my nearly launched daughter had secured a place to live in her new hometown and a means by which to explore it. It was fairly quick work, backed up by lots of advance planning and information gathering. As I said, the computer has certainly put so much information at our fingertips to make relocating to a new place easier, but nothing can take the place of that final piece of real-life, on-site research.

— Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader