ricky wrote:California is fun and all, but it's retarded expensive and they have no idea what the world outside of California is like. It's whack how detached they are from the rest of the country.
Gas is higher, but not by a huge amount. Last time when I was in LA on vacation, back when gas was in excess of $3 a gallon at home, it was only about 20-30% higher out there. In the distant past, when I've travelled to LA for business, food has never been much higher (as long as you want fast food... service restaurants were a good bit more). The vacation we rented a house for about half the price of hotels, and cooked at the house most days. Prices in the grocery stores weren't much higher. It's the housing that gets you. My current home is about $120k market value. Same thing would run you $2M in the Bay area or SoCal. That huge price difference is why cities like NY, LA, SF--well, anywhere in the world with that high a population density--are so much more expensive to live. It means people need to make at least 2-3x what they'd make in Omaha, Nebraska or Birmingham, Alabama or anywhere else there's land to spare.
But for vacations or business trips... it's not really too bad (if you don't figure in hotels and such... it's why couch surfing is so popular, I think.)
As far as detached... that's everywhere you go. People here in the midwest are completely detached from what it's like to live in major areas like that... the traffic, the housing, the different environment, the different social structures. California, "San Angeles" to be precise, is completely different from NY, DC, or Boston. Dallas and Houston traffic is bad when it comes to it, but it's nothing compared to LA or NYC (I refuse to drive NYC). They're still Midwesterners and Texans.
edit: don't mean to hijack your thread, burinn. Hope you had some fun on the travels. I love roaming around myself. Always a good chance to get to see new places and meet other strange, new people.
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