profdant139 wrote:
And I would add to Phil's observations -- as much as we like to whine about Calif., we are still here. We eat three meals a day on our patio, no screen room, for most of the year, no bugs. I drive a few minutes to an excellent surf break, at least once a week. Those two "lifestyle enhancements" are really valuable to me, despite all of the other frustrations of urban living.
Dan, I'm biased (and blessed) because of where we live. We don't live in Regular California ... we live ~1800 feet up in Another California.
In that California: We do get some dark enough and smogless enough skies to actually see some stars. We can BBQ outside all year around with no bugs. Our local full service grocery market is 2 miles down a two-lane country road with almost no traffic to get to it and the clerks know us by first name. We have 11-12 wild turkeys in our forest at times and other times we can have 7-8 deer grazing in our meadow, with 2-3 of them being bucks. But ... Another California is only an island of serenity ... just a few miles off the island is the sea of chaos of Silicon Valley and it's traffic with high-strung people trying to drive and survive.
Since we live among beautiful trees, we don't necessarily need to RV camp in treed areas. We often camp in the desert for the longer range views and the serenity of rockhounding out in the middle of nowhere. After staying a bit in Quartszite this upcoming January, we plan on doing some additional exploring in Arizona.
BTW, Lopez Lake and Jalama Beach provided some great RV drycamping over the Thanksgiving Holidays!
