Well said. Before we moved to ${MARQUEE_LOCATION} my partner and I made a couple visits of about 2 weeks each, each time staying in different neighborhoods. We decided it was right for us and made the move, and knew even what neighborhood was for us.

I've personally found that staying long enough to have time to get a minor routine in the new place can be super helpful.

> It is easy to fantasize the positive about a new place without living / thinking of the negative.

This is very true. I live in a state that I don't much care for poltics-wise, but I have a lot of family and friends here, which makes it 100% worth it.

I am a Silicon Valley native, graduated from Stanford, worked at Google for a decade. Never felt like I belonged there socially or in terms of viewpoints.

I left to complete the journey to financial independence without the burden of California state income tax. I got no benefit from being around a bunch of one dimensional software engineers with zero creativity in their lives outside of tech, no sense of independence or adventure.

That's generalizing, California is huge, and has big creative art scenes. The tech bubble side of things is not all there is to it.

You’re hanging out with the wrong engineers.

But I hear you. You should move, at least do a six month lease somewhere and work remotely.

Where’d you go Bouts?

5) Is the weather aligned with your activities?

Like, no, thank you, as someone who goes outside every week-end, I'm not moving somewhere where it's 100F or 20F for like 3-6 months of the year. It's insane coming from Western Europe how shitty of the US is climate-wise.

We Californians (possibly other places in the same latitude) are spoiled like that, but can anyone blame us? For most of the year, weather is something that just doesn't need to enter the equation when planning things. I know that "but the weather" is kind of a meme for Californians, though I will say that it really is pretty frickin' nice having lived in New Zealand (a really nice place btw) where it rains heavily for a large portion of the year.

Depends where you are in NZ, of course. Some places it only rains for much of the year.

I grew up in NZ, moved to Colorado for ten years and whined about the snow, then came home and realised how good I'd had it in CO. I hadn't noticed the rain because I'd grown up with it. Only when I came back to it from a place with little and predictable rain, did I notice it.

I'm outdoors almost every day in New Zealand - arguably with the worst weather in NZ, in Wellington. The trick is to not let the rain chase you back inside. It's just a bit of water. We're lucky here that temperatures are bearable basically year round. The spring wind is the thing that stops me going outside most of the time.

I lived in Welly, though yeah I imagine maybe up north it would have been a bit more temperate for more of the year.

Well called, Wellington. I lived there for five university years, but home is up north in Leigh.

I grew up barefoot. Went to university in Wellington and in my first year, had to go see the doctor. "I have weird things on my feet."

"They're chilblains! Wear shoes!"

Wellington definitely has a different climate to the north.

Western Europe definitely gets the better end of the deal on the Gulf Stream.

Places like Spain and France get the pleasant end of the stream that brings slightly warmer weather than they otherwise would have given the latitude.

Meanwhile, the eastern part of the US gets the chaotic middle portion that generates hurricanes.

As a lifetime Californian (granted one who grew up in Sacramento where it regularly exceeds 100F in the summer), I concur. One of the most depressing things about considering moving from California is the weather in much of the rest of the country. Much of the northern part of the country gets extremely cold and snowy in the winter, which is something I don't want to deal with. Much of the southern part of the country has very humid summers, which I also don't want to deal with. I remember living near Tokyo for a short time as an intern and experiencing its summer; a 95F day there felt like 110F in Sacramento. Thankfully I loved just about every other aspect of living near Tokyo, but Tokyo's hot and humid summers wasn't one of them.

My favorite weather is the Mediterranean weather on California's coast, particularly the Central Coast. The favorable weather is one of the reasons why the area is so expensive. Barring that, I can cope with the warm Mediterranean climate of the Central Valley. Yes it gets hot in the summer, but it's a dry heat, and the winters are also dry, with snow being a once-per-generation occurrence, and the spring and fall are just as nice as on the coast. Barring that, I like the weather in the Pacific Northwest; yes it does rain a lot, but the summers are amazing. I also heard good things about the weather in parts of New Mexico, where it's a high elevation desert and thus it doesn't get too hot in the summer, and where it sometimes snows in the winter but doesn't get extremely cold like it does in places farther north.

Wonder if this is point of view based on what you grew up with. I grew up in the midwest US, and very much like the experience of four distinct seasons every year. I would not want to live somewhere where it is cold all the time, or hot all the time, or even "just right" all the time.

You raise a good point. The consistency of California's weather reminds me a bit of the movie Groundhog Day. Seasonal changes are so subtle that it is easy to forget that years have gone by...

The weather in California is none too amazing these last five years. Fleeing from unbreathable air in the summer, no ski season worth mentioning.

It depends where you are in California. In parts of SoCal 100F is pretty typical. And the air quality is bad.

yeah air quality is terrible in Los Angeles when I visited there.

Is it mostly automobiles? Does it get better outside the cities?

Outside the biggest cities it's actually worse. For particulate pollution you need that special mix of cars, off-road equipment, smoke, and dust. Like Fresno. https://www.lung.org/research/sota/city-rankings/states/cali...

US has a lot of sunshine hours compared to most of Europe. As someone living in country which has less than 30 hours of sun in December, I'd gladly swap with most of US states.

This is such a big pain, it's probably the one reason pushing me to move back to Europe. Europe has a much gentler climate because of the Mediterranean sea and the Sirocco.

Brexit makes this comment more accurate