My California Year

I was born and raised in the Midwest — Iowa, to be precise.

I was pretty content living in the land of Tall Corn and High Humidity, at least until I heard about a place where it never gets cold and the sun always shines. And where there were palm trees and beaches and girls in bikinis and, well, you know…

It was a place called California.

In the Summer of 1969, me and three teen friends got into a green Mustang and headed west to the Golden State to see what the heck was going on Out There.

We landed in Long Beach, where we rented a cheap room on the strip and wandered around the area, competing with thousands of white-clad drunken sailors stationed there for the attention of a few semi-attractive ladies strolling up and down the sidewalks.

Anyway, the highlight of our weeklong California adventure was hearing that — up in L.A. only a few miles away — several people had been murdered by a vicious "hippie" cult later known as the Manson Family.

That trip was the first of several I made to California over the next few years. Each time, I either ran out of money, got homesick or just couldn’t handle being alone.

So I kept returning to Iowa -- but still yearning to make the Big Jump to the West Coast.

Finally, after marrying my Sweet Wife, I had the support I’d always needed to make the move a lasting one. Together with our two young boys, we loaded up a converted school/hunting bus, painted a rainbow on each side and headed for California.

Long story a little shorter: After living for a year in Fort Collins, Colorado, we eventually pushed on to California’s lovely Central Coast and rented an apartment in Atascadero. My wife got a job as a bank teller and I was hired as a reporter for a coastal newspaper.

Life, at first, was pretty great, I must admit. I was working in my chosen field for the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder in Arroyo Grande. On my lunch hour, I would often drive down to nearby Pismo Beach and walk barefoot along the ocean -- and simply marvel that I had finally succeeded at what I had failed to do so many times before.

We soon settled into a weekly routine of school and daycare for our boys, work for us Monday through Friday and weekends spent either at the beach or just exploring the beautiful area.

I’d never experienced an earthquake before, but we had several mostly small shakers while we lived there. Nothing really scary, though.

As I said, Life was good, but it slowly began to dawn on us that our sons — if we dug in and stayed there — would have to grow up without any other family around. No cousins or grandparents or aunts or uncles, etc.

And that just didn’t seem fair.

You know, California often gets a bad rap for awful traffic and earthquakes and fires and mudslides and serial killers, etc., etc…

Well, OK...

But except for a few small quakes, none of that happened to us. Atascadero, in those days, was a friendly little town about 20 miles from the beach with a laid-back, tiny zoo that our boys enjoyed very much.

After about a year, though, my wife and I decided to pull the plug on our California adventure and head Back East. However, instead of returning to Iowa, we decided to put our roots down in Northern Colorado, where we now had friends and family members.

Looking back, I’m extremely glad we pursued My Dream of Living in the Golden State -- and I was able to experience the only Winter I’ve ever had without any snow.

Or Winter temps below 50 degrees. Oh, yeah...

But I'd finally gotten that California Fantasy out of my system -- and we ended up a few years later happily living on a mountain in Colorado.

Funny how things sometimes work out...

I'll never forget our wonderful year in California. I now know it wasn't meant for me and my family to live there permanently.

But it was fun while it lasted.