I could of course do without the ridiculous gun laws California has chosen to employ, but I could absolutely not do without California.
Those are my feelings exactly.
Born in southern California in 1949 and lived there until 1958 when my Dad (in a stroke of genius) moved all six of us to Japan for four years (worked for Lockheed). None of us in the family liked SoCal (smog, congestion, people, etc.) and my Dad was able to have us settle in northern California upon our return (Santa Clara Valley) since he landed a job at Lockheed Missles and Space Company in Sunnyvale.
At that time, Santa Clara Valley was utopia. Small towns seperated by huge orchards of apricots, peaches, cherries and plums. Perfect weather, great location (1 hour south of San Francisco). A great place to grow up before they paved it all over with shopping malls, freeways and home tracts on every square foot of available land. I escaped in 1988 to the Central Valley for 8 years and commuted to the Bay Area.
I ended up in Ukiah in 2001 on a small farm just on the outskirts of town. It is hot here in the summer but we love it. Clear air, no street lights or anything to dim the billions of stars seen everynight. My three adult kids are leasing a house in town about 15 minutes away and we are constantly planning and doing things together. We are blessed by many unscheduled drop-in visits and they make our day. Anywhere north or west from here is sparsely populated beautiful country + the coast is to die for.
We live in a "shall issue" county and we have probably the best county sheriff's office in the state. Tom Allman is a personal friend of mine and a great person as well as top notch LEO. We have the huge Mendocino National Forest just north of us, lakes and rivers all around us, large BLM land just east of us. Great place to be an outdoorsman. The motorcycling doesn't get any better than this.
The rest of the world just doesn't realize that the best of California (95%) is NOT in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Sacramento. I wouldn't live anywhere else on earth.
Dan