I was born and raised in California. I lived there my whole life until I was in my mid-50s. I lived in LA, Santa Monica, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Pasadena, and Pacific Palisades. It’s a spectacular state and people love living there for a host of compelling reasons. I could go to the beach in the morning and enjoy the surf, fly my slope gliders on an ocean bluff after lunch on the pier, and be at my mountain cabin in Big Bear surrounded by 8 feet of snow and the ski slopes by nightfall. If you haven’t really lived there, you can’t understand how spectacular it is. LA and SF have the best of everything. Santa Barbara is just a couple of hours up the coast from LA (or a 45 min flight from Santa Monica if you have access to a Cessna). I made a lot of great memories in California and it will always hold a special place in my heart.
It genuinely angers me what has happened to that state over the last 30 years. The politics literally drove me out. By the time I left, I was spitting nails about what LA, Santa Monica and the Palisades had become. San Francisco and the Bay Area was, without question, one of the nicest places to live on the planet. Now these places are dystopian hellscapes.
Outside these major cities there are still plenty of nice places in Cali, but even those places live under the thumb of the corrupt lib-t@ard morons in Sacramento. They deserve nothing but ridicule and contempt, as does the state as a whole for how the majority of its people vote, and think. As much as I have loved that state, I will never go back again and leaving it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I‘m so much happier in my little slice of redneck paradise.
FJB, and FGN. And F Sacramento and the idiots who put those bastards in the state house.