My month in California

 My take on California

I learned after I'd been here for about a week that I wasn't even remotely ready to make the most of my month here - or even to use my limited time well.  For some reason, I decided to stay at the Needles campground for only 2 nights - just enough time to visit the Mojave National Preserve.  And from there I kept moving, seeing more things and finding more places that didn't have good wifi access.  I wasn't able to finish my posts for Arizona until the 9th, and couldn't start posting about California until well after that.

Between all the moving around and seeing new sights and not having finished my last state and being surprised by this new one, I became what you might call disoriented.  And all that filtered into my impression of my month here.

California's land

northern California

southern California

I tried to position these 2 maps so you could maybe see where they overlap.  They were one behind the other on the page so I couldn't piece them together to make it easier to see.  And anyway, these were so big I had to stand on a stool and raise the camera up to try to fit all of each piece into the frame, so I'd never have been able to fit in the whole map.

As you may be able to see (the map shows as being faint because it was faint - I darkened it but was starting from pale markings), I missed the entire southern piece of the state, from San Diego across to Arizona and all the way up the coast to Los Angeles.  That's a big chunk of the state to miss, and I really didn't want to miss it.  I just ran short of time and gasoline money.  It didn't occur to me before I started (as I said, I was completely unprepared to travel in this state), but I should have planned to spend 2 months here instead of 1.  I knew intellectually that CA is our 3rd largest state, but it just doesn't look that way to me on maps so, emotionally, I didn't think it'd be all that big.  It is.  It's really big.

And regarding the land itself, the biggest surprise for me was that so much of the state is covered with mountains.  I've tended to think of CA as being the fairly flat part that's along the southern route (I-10) that I used to drive to and from Texas - the desert part.  Mostly I'd get over to the coast and be distracted by the ocean-view scenery from noticing that my drive included a lot of hills.  A few times I drove up the middle of the state on what was US-99 but is now I-5.  At the time I saw that area too as being fairly flat; it is CA's farm country, after all.

But after my travels in other parts of the US, I can now see even the I-5 area as being merely a valley between nearby mountain ranges.  So yeah, it's flat in comparison, but it's mountain-valley flat, not desert-flat, if you see what I mean.  All over the state, from Palm Springs to Cascade City, I drove in high hills and mountains.  And I didn't expect that at all.

CA has the same range of countryside that Texas does - from deserts to oceans to mountains; from the Mojave (driest desert in North America) to near rain forests (coastal redwoods); from tiny towns to major population centers (3 of the 10 largest cities in the US).

CA's farmland produces more sales value of agricultural products (crops and livestock) than any other US state.  I honestly find this hard to believe and checked again online, but as of 2019 ag receipts, it's true.  Maybe it's because CA produces products that are higher-end market value, like pistachios and almonds and artichokes, than - say - Iowa's corn.  But as far as I can tell, without irrigation, CA's ag industry would literally bite the dust.  Remember Chinatown?  The 1974 movie about shenanigans with the water supply intended for orange groves?  As far as I can tell, things have only gotten more complicated in the last 50 years.

And speaking of water supply, given the multi-state problems with parceling out the reduced flow in the Colorado River, I don't know how the City of Los Angeles thinks it'll be able to keep supporting its continuing growth (a 2.8% increase in 2020 over 2010).  Given the vastly differing needs and resources between the various areas of the state, CA's decision-makers are dealing with a situation that's nearly impossible to resolve.

California's people

As you might imagine from what I said about the land, the people who live in CA can be quite different from each other.  Much as it is in Texas, in similarly large CA very different people with very different aims in life all live in this same state.  I guess I'd have to say that, in general, the people I met were pleasant - even helpful.  But I also found more rudeness - or at least grumpiness - than I expected to find here.  More, in fact, than I've found in most other states.  

I don't know why that was, and I didn't see any kind of pattern.  The month of March is a sort of off-season for tourism here, so I can't just chalk it up to being tired of tourists.  And I don't think it was a reaction to me wearing a mask, because many local people were wearing masks still, in stores and shops and even outdoors.

Tourism is one of the main driving forces in CA's economy, and it took a serious hit during the height of the pandemic.  It's coming back now, and I'd've thought those facts would mean I'd see happy, welcoming faces.  Maybe that's why I'm so surprised that I often didn't.  A shame.  It tends to color my view of the state.

And by the way, the people I talked to were split in their views of the desirability of living in CA.  Some loved it and were quite content, while others didn't care for it at all and were thinking of moving elsewhere.  That didn't seem to be a function of political preferences; it was more about the number of people.  And there are a lot of people here: CA ranks #1 in the US for number of residents.

Driving in California

CA's current license plate

Pictured above is a front plate; the back plate has a year sticker in the upper right corner.  These plates have been official since 2011.  But I still saw a lot of the old black-with-gold-letters plates, and have just learned that those have been issued beginning in 1963 and are still valid.  But these white ones are what I saw the most often.

I found CA's drivers to be a mixed bag.  Lots of times people let me merge in front of them or waited to let me pull out of a parking lot into a street.  But also lots of times, people cut me off or zoomed up to get ahead of me (somewhat dangerously).  I never knew what to expect from another driver.  

What I found most odd was that most of the politeness was from city drivers, while most of the rudeness was from drivers in rural areas.  I honestly would have expected it to be the other way around.

Besides the drivers, what I noticed most about driving in CA was how the state (or local government) didn't seem interested in helping me figure out how to get where I was going.  In towns, this meant a lack of street signs or a lack of legible and easily findable street signs.  On highways, this meant I might see plenty of signs telling me how many miles I was from such-and-such but a dearth of signs telling me where to turn or what name/number a highway had.  That's mostly why I got lost so often here - nobody (no signs) wanted to tell me where I was or how to get somewhere else.

No discussion of driving in CA would be complete without a mention of the price of gasoline.  Yes, I know the price is high throughout the country (with much of the blame, in my mind, on Putin's stupid desire to recreate the Russian Empire).  But CA has the highest gas tax in the US, and once you tack that onto the high gas prices - and factor in rising inflation - you get some seriously expensive gasoline.  And this is hitting me in the 3rd largest state.  That means a lot of miles.  I found I was becoming reluctant to drive sometimes, just because it was going to cost me so much money.  And I guess in some ways, this trip is all about driving, which gave me a mild dilemma.

What I wanted to see that I missed

A lengthy list.  Very lengthy.  In addition, of course, to all those places I mentioned in my daily posts.  

For instance, the entire San Diego area.  I wanted to visit the San Diego zoo and especially to see the pandas.  Also San Diego de Alcala, the oldest of the Spanish missions built in CA; this one was founded in 1769.  I missed going farther south and seeing the border with Mexico, to compare it to what I saw in Texas.

I completely missed Stockton and Modesto, and only had a brief drive-through in Fresno - all major areas in central CA.

Both the Nixon and Reagan Presidential Libraries are in CA, and though I wasn't exactly a fan of either president, I still wanted to visit their libraries.  I thought I might learn something about their presidencies that would help me understand how they became the people they seemed.  The Nixon library is in Yorba Linda, and the Reagan library is in Simi Valley - both places that I drove very near.  But because I was so not ready for this state, I didn't realize they were there until I'd already passed by, and I just didn't have either the time (only a month) or the money (gas prices over $5.50) to go back.

In the Los Angeles area, I missed such well known places as Long Beach, Huntington Beach, Redondo Beach; Irvine, San Juan Capistrano, Anaheim (does anybody else remember Jan & Dean's 1964 song Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association?).

I passed through Auburn on my way out of the state, but I'd wanted to stop because it's home to one of the West's oldest volunteer firefighting organizations - established in 1852.  The Old Town's Firehouse has a bell that rings at 8:00, 12:00 noon, and 5:00.  I have several relatives in my mom's family who were long-time volunteer firefighters, so I'm interested.

Spring was definitely showing up in southern CA, but farther north - and especially in the high mountains - winter was just barely receding.  This meant a lot of roads I might have taken in the summer weren't even open yet when I got there - in Sequoia National Park, for instance.  But I felt definitely lucky that the fires that have so plagued CA in recent years still left enormous stands of coastal redwoods and interior sequoias untouched.  And I felt even luckier not to encounter any fires myself, as I did in Colorado last year.  California's trees are the true source of beauty in the state, and with the continuing drought and reduced snow pack, climate change could do a real number on CA's economy.

My conclusion

While I've sometimes begun traveling in a state I hadn't prepared for, and it took me several days to get myself oriented there, my experience in CA was orders of magnitude beyond that.  It wasn't fair either to me or to what California had to offer for me to have tried to do my visit in only 1 month, and to have failed to plan ahead any more than I did.  In my defense, I was still a little disoriented after my interrupted "month" in Arizona and was still trying to complete the AZ blog posts as late as the 2nd week of March - meaning my head was still at least partly back in Arizona and not here in California.

Even trying to take all that into account, I have mixed feelings about my month here.  I liked very much seeing what I was able to see and would be happy to do a 2nd month here picking up on all the things I missed.  On the other hand, I really did meet enough grouchy people that it's hard for me to feel as positive about them as I do about the scenic wonders here.  In counterbalance to that were the really great visits I had with my cousin Gail and her family and my friend Morgan and his family.  But even there - I hadn't planned for and had to miss seeing my cousin Elaine in Los Angeles.

It's a little muddling to my head, and it's not helped by the fact that I'm already halfway into my month in Nevada and only just now finishing my CA posts.  I cannot for the life of me understand why I had such a hard time getting decent internet service throughout the state of California.  All kinds of places where you'd think connectivity would be a given.  Nope.  Neither my hotspot nor the various campgrounds' systems could receive consistent signals.  I'm not one of those who can't put my phone down (mainly because it's a flip phone that receives nothing but calls), but I still found it very disorienting after a while not to know what was going on in the world and not even able to figure out directions to places.

I guess this conclusion isn't very conclusive, but maybe that's a good illustration of my feelings about this state.