Oregon is probably my favorite state. Not only is Portland and the surrounding area beautiful, but the rest of the state is incredible. FS, of course.
I stayed for a few days near Crater Lake in Medford and even the surrounding scenery around Crater Lake had such incredible natural beauty. Rolling planes dead ending into the foothills of the mountain.
And the coast! Oh the coast of Oregon! The Oregon dunes are incredible, even if my visit coincided with 55 degrees and rain in July. The old industrial towns along the shoreline are quaint, beautiful and full of regional history.
And the people are incredible in Oregon. It's the kind of nice that people say "Midwestern nice" is, without the self-absorbed nature of "Midwestern nice."
Y'all drive like crap in Oregon, though. 
Thanks Birch Bayh!
Firstly, thank you talking about coming out to visit for a time and checking out a wide range of the State during your visit(s) over the years, not to mention showcasing the natural beauty and using a local Midwestern term to describe how Oregonians tend to communicate with one another, as well as visitors from other parts of the Country.
To go a bit OT, one of the gals I worked with in Houston a couple years back, who was a direct report of mine for about four years, was selected to visit a few client sites as part of some new Corp Program that I had volunteered her for.
She had never lived outside of Texas, nor spent much time ever out of the Southlands, with relatives in Louisiana and Georgia being heavy on her parent's family side....
Stacy who is a Millennial Black Woman who grew up in Houston Texas, flew out to Oregon to go the same client site that I had worked on for over a decade.
Interestingly enough, her recounting of interactions with Oregonians was pretty much the same as your's.
When she came back, describing the experience, it actually reminded me of how polite and welcoming the people of Texas were when I moved out there!
Now--- you're gonna be hitting a nerve when it comes to driving!!!!
Hell--- we are all trained in defensive driving and anyone going 5 MPH over speed limit is speeding...
Anyone that goes 10 MPH over the speed limit is considered to be a reckless driver in the minds of most residents of the state.
Now, where the stereotype is true, would be something like this little skit from Portlandia...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aIfarMPmPQI have actually had so many experiences like this, especially when my wife is in the car, where we go through this whole debate about who should go first at a four way stop...
So---- Illinois rocks--- Chi Town is the heart of the "3rd Coast"....
Not only the foundation of the American social, economic, and demographic growth in the key era of industrialization (1880-1920), where people fled the repression in Germany after the failed revolution of 1848 in heavy numbers, the Irish arrived around that same time, slightly later Central & Eastern Europeans, tons of African-Africans flowing up the Mississippi River delta to seek opportunities, and bail on the whole Jim Crow scene during the Great Depression as part of a mixture of an internal "push-pull" domestic immigration scenario.
Anyways--- got a ton of other positive things to say about Illinois, but ran out of space, AND was planning to skip in Illinois, but since I got line-jumped, wanted to point out how IL is a freedom state, without even going into kids books that I started reading when I was 7 about the history of Abraham Lincoln growing up in the rural frontier....
