Growing up near Washington, D.C., my main impression of Oregon came from “The Oregon Trail,” a then-new-fangled computer game that was the highlight of elementary school in the late 1980s.

In the game, you pack a virtual wagon with supplies and then trudge west past landmarks such as Chimney Rock, along the way fording rivers, shooting wild game for food and trying to avoid death by dysentery or snake bite.

You win the game if you survive long enough to settle down in the Willamette Valley, the floppy disk equivalent of The Promised Land.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve tried to console myself with the fact that if real life were like The Oregon Trail, I’d be getting ready to win the game.

Next month, I’m moving to Portland, where my husband has accepted a new job. You’ll still see my byline in the paper occasionally, as I research and write stories of statewide relevance from Oregon’s largest city.

I’m excited about the new assignment and its new setting.

But this is a hard place to leave. In fact, after living here for nearly a decade, I can’t help but wonder why those computerized settlers didn’t make it to Bend, settle down and call it a win.

This, my last column, is meant to serve as a sort of thank you note to Central Oregon: Thank you for being my home the last nine years.

To say that I’ve enjoyed it here would be a serious understatement.

When I moved from New York City, in 2004, I figured I’d stay for a year or two, then head to a bigger newspaper back East. This short-term adventure, I figured, would give me stories to tell at cocktail parties for the rest of my life: My Year In The Wild West.

I tried to summon that sense of adventure one Thursday night in April 2004, just two months after I arrived. That’s when I found myself riding my bike to Deschutes Brewery, to go on the first blind date of my life. A classmate in the pottery course I was taking had set me up with a man she barely knew. As I shook hands with him outside the pub, I told myself: “At least this will make a good story, someday.”

It did, although our son is likely to grow tired of hearing it.

The High Desert was more than a backdrop for our courtship. This landscape determined much of what we did together — and, as a result, it shaped who we are.

We toured breweries together. We cast fly rods up and down the Deschutes River. We skied cross-country trails throughout the Cascades. We planted a vegetable garden — and then covered it with blankets, to stave off frost damage, almost nightly. We learned to hunt — well, I did, anyway, and my husband learned to help me dress, butcher and eat our quarry.

Likewise, my career at The Bulletin was built on the sorts of people and events that couldn’t be found anyplace else.

I’ll never forget knocking on doors in rural precincts for three different presidential elections.

It was a privilege to tell the tale of Wendy Silva’s harrowing escape from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, of Bend teen MyKensie Martin’s disappearance and reappearance in Brazil in 2005, of the remarkable spirit of Summer Stiers, who died in 2009 of an unknown genetic illness that is still being studied by the National Institutes of Health.

There are too many other characters and stories to list here, but I will carry them with me forever.

I’m leaving Central Oregon with a much fuller life than I had when I arrived. I now have a husband, a child, a book that I’ve written and published, not to mention gobs of outdoor gear and a severe caffeine addiction.

And stories. Lots and lots of stories.

For all of it, I am grateful.

Central Oregon: Thank you.