bgross
Recusant Infidel
The short answer is "There's no place like home!"
We've done a bit of traveling (30+ states, including Alaska & Hawaii; 20+ countries on four continents) and have enjoyed diverse foods, languages, cultures, sights, sounds, smells, art, architecture, people, geography, views and weather.
(Notice I left out the forbidden two: politics & religion.)
Every time we come home, we say the same thing:
"There's no place like home!"
California has been my home since my birth, a few miles from the Rose Bowl. It was where my mother was born and died. Her father (my grandfather) was born in Los Angeles in 1897 - the same year that his grandmother (my great-great grandmother) wrote a newspaper article in which she described L.A. As "to me, the Paradise of earth."
My father was raised in the Bay Area. My children were born here.
So the answer to the "why California?" question is a lot like the answer to "Why the U.S.A?":
It is the "land of my fathers".
Roots run deep.
My family tree - traced back on both my father's and my mother's side - goes back to before the Declaration of Independence - nearly 100 years before California was a state. My ancestors have fought in EVERY war abroad - and on both sides during that most costly of wars in the 1860s. It is in our blood.
I am as proud to be a Californian as I am to be an American. Just as proud as some of you are to be from Dixie, or New England, or Canada.
The fact that I'm writing this in my dining room, overlooking the Blue Pacific, wearing shorts & a tshirt... Is just icing on the cake.
Trying to decide which bike to ride - on any day of the year - is nice, too.
Leaving my house at dawn, riding over Ortega Hwy, out to Julian for pie & coffee, down through Anza-Borrego, to the Salton Sea, cross the border into Arizona - and be home before sunset?
Priceless.
Yeah, California has it's share of problems.
But it's where my home is.
By birth.
By choice.
Until they slip a tag on my toe!
We've done a bit of traveling (30+ states, including Alaska & Hawaii; 20+ countries on four continents) and have enjoyed diverse foods, languages, cultures, sights, sounds, smells, art, architecture, people, geography, views and weather.
(Notice I left out the forbidden two: politics & religion.)
Every time we come home, we say the same thing:
"There's no place like home!"
California has been my home since my birth, a few miles from the Rose Bowl. It was where my mother was born and died. Her father (my grandfather) was born in Los Angeles in 1897 - the same year that his grandmother (my great-great grandmother) wrote a newspaper article in which she described L.A. As "to me, the Paradise of earth."
My father was raised in the Bay Area. My children were born here.
So the answer to the "why California?" question is a lot like the answer to "Why the U.S.A?":
It is the "land of my fathers".
Roots run deep.
My family tree - traced back on both my father's and my mother's side - goes back to before the Declaration of Independence - nearly 100 years before California was a state. My ancestors have fought in EVERY war abroad - and on both sides during that most costly of wars in the 1860s. It is in our blood.
I am as proud to be a Californian as I am to be an American. Just as proud as some of you are to be from Dixie, or New England, or Canada.
The fact that I'm writing this in my dining room, overlooking the Blue Pacific, wearing shorts & a tshirt... Is just icing on the cake.
Trying to decide which bike to ride - on any day of the year - is nice, too.
Leaving my house at dawn, riding over Ortega Hwy, out to Julian for pie & coffee, down through Anza-Borrego, to the Salton Sea, cross the border into Arizona - and be home before sunset?
Priceless.
Yeah, California has it's share of problems.
But it's where my home is.
By birth.
By choice.
Until they slip a tag on my toe!
