From the Road #12808

Cali's Valley

About a year and a half ago I got married and moved to the Central Valley of California. I was so excited about living in Cali and was expecting warm weather, palm trees, and bikinis. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you get my point.

The Central Valley is pretty lame. Actually, it's really lame. If you're not a farmer or raise livestock then you really have no business here (my wife makes cheese, so we have an excuse). The "warm" weather consists of our nine months of summer in which the weather is usually pushing 90 to 100 degrees (there are a lot of palm trees, however, and I like palm trees).

I began to get used to the fact that anything I would want to do in a big city would mean an hour and a half drive. It's not completely a bad thing as there are SO many things that lie an hour and a half away (San Francisco, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe). However, none of this stuff is what I am going to rant about. No, I have found something far more annoying in my time here than anything as trivial as the above mentioned.

For every five trucks in the Central Valley, three will have lift kits on them. I grew up in Fife, WA so I'm pretty used to seeing hicks driving up and down the street (and meth labs getting busted), but I've never seen so many lifted trucks in my life. I didn't notice it until a friend pointed it out to me and now it's all I see when I'm driving. I find myself counting trucks that are lifted and creating a ratio in my head of lifted to nonlifted trucks.

The most interesting part of this is the general age group of people driving said trucks. I would have expected to see mostly 20 something young adults romping through town, showing off their prize, but it's generally middle-aged men, often with families in the truck. It's funny how different of a culture it is here than with Washington. Up north, I would expect a man going through a mid-life crisis to be trying to burn out in his convertible Mazda Miata.

There are also a lot of Mexicans here.


Love,



Mike S