We Were Told To Avoid California

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Before we came to California, we heard a lot of things about California.

[00:00:04]>> And not all of them good.

[00:00:05]>> It's too expensive. Too political. Too many rules. Too crowded. And that we should avoid California at all costs.

[00:00:13]And honestly, some of that turned out to be true. But a lot of it didn't.

[00:00:38]Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. We promised you that we would have a more upbeat video this week.

[00:00:45]Um we're still missing our little buddy.

[00:00:49]But the show must go on.

[00:00:53]One day at a time. Now, California.

[00:00:58]We've been here now over about 4 months.

[00:01:03]And we've gone to what's supposed to be like, you know, the exclusive places.

[00:01:10]>> [laughter] >> You know, San Diego and uh Palm Springs.

[00:01:14]We just went to Palm Springs this past weekend.

[00:01:17]Um we went into the jewel of the Inland Empire.

[00:01:23]Redlands.

[00:01:23]>> Redlands.

[00:01:25]Where Cindy works. And we just want to give you an honest, straightforward, completely unbiased assessment. There are so many RVers out there that just, I mean, they talk about California like it's the ninth plane of hell. Or at the very least, like it's another country.

[00:01:44]>> Yeah.

[00:01:46]And and not a good one. And here's the truth. We have been across we you know this. If you if you've ever watched the channel, you know we've been across the country four times now. Back and forth and back and forth and up and down and so on. Not too far up.

[00:02:02]>> Not too far up now.

[00:02:03]>> There's snow up there. Yeah.

[00:02:05]Which we avoid at all costs.

[00:02:08]But I grew up in New York. Cindy grew up in Eastern North Carolina in the country. In in really in the country and in a in a town that was about this big on the map. You have to go in really far with the fingers on the map to get to it. So I mean we have had both ends of the experience, okay? I hate New York. I know I grew up there. I'm not a fan.

[00:02:35]>> [laughter] >> Okay? But not because of anything political or any of that. I just don't like New York. The people just tend to be nasty. And you want to talk about the land of taxes?

[00:02:49]Cuz that's one of the things you hear about California. There's so many taxes and there are. Yeah yeah yes there are.

[00:02:54]They >> And and and things are more expensive here, some things. Now, right now in 2026, everything's expensive everywhere.

[00:03:02]So I'm not sure that we're feeling that as much here because a difference as much because >> all expensive when we got here.

[00:03:09]>> Yeah. And everything was already everything's expensive everywhere. So it's not like, you know, gas is a little more expensive but we've seen some other places online that are just as expensive or more expensive than here. And and to be straightforward, which everyone going to be straightforward and I'm biased, yes, gas is higher here than pretty much anywhere else in the country. And that's because of taxes. That's everything.

[00:03:31]Now, anybody our age should be able to remember looking back at the news broadcast talking about how basically you couldn't see the entirety of Los Angeles because of the smog.

[00:03:47]>> Yeah, I remember that. I mean in in North Carolina, in New York, they used to have it on the news about how incredibly bad the smog was here. Air pollution. You don't want to go to those big cities. It's all air pollution.

[00:04:00]Especially Los Angeles. Yeah. Okay. And do you blame them for trying to regulate the amount of internal combustion engines that they have here? It's it's pretty straightforward and it's I think a lot of people forget all that. Yeah.

[00:04:17]Do I like paying this much for gas? No.

[00:04:20]Not even a little. It just cost me a little about a week and a half ago. Cost me $134 to fill up my gas tank on my truck. Huh?

[00:04:30]>> [laughter] >> He sent me a picture of it the gas pump at work. Yeah, it's right here.

[00:04:35]>> [laughter] >> Um so yeah, but isn't the state isn't entirely about their gas prices. No. And there's so much here that you don't see anywhere else. I mean, you have to be in California, Oregon, or Washington to see the Pacific Ocean. Um Which if you look at our past video, I was me seeing it for the first time. And that's the main reason I started traveling nursing was so we could see the country. So we could see all different types of places.

[00:05:01]And there's a lot here. We are living between two mountain ranges. We are on San Gorgonio Pass and the highway freeway where we are Freeway, we're in California.

[00:05:13]>> Right off the freeway where we are goes right through that pass and it's beautiful. Everywhere we look is something beautiful to look at and I have as far as people are concerned, I have had no issues with anybody at work, patients. I've had the best experience with a unit that I've ever had at a hospital. The people here are extremely nice. If you look back at some of the videos we talked about where we would and wouldn't want to live, one of them was Cottonwood that we definitely would and that was the last place that's I've heard that I ever heard Cindy talk about how good her contract was and how nice the people were to work with. And now California.

[00:05:56]>> And something he mentioned the other day was that we grew up hearing that California is the land of fruits and nuts, that the people are different, that the people I don't know, that they're aliens or something. I don't know. It's It's just a stereotype because I guess because the '60s and '70s there was a lot of the hippie culture here, and there still is some. And the way people are personified as a group, this is a huge state. You can't say everybody in California anything. No. Because you've got all kinds of people. Young people, old people. You've got some homeless people.

[00:06:30]You've got rich people. You've got all kinds of people, just like you do anywhere else.

[00:06:35]>> And and to a point Cindy just made, we talk about the homeless people here.

[00:06:39]Everybody talks about how, "Oh my god, they're everywhere. There There's this huge boom in homelessness and in San Francisco and in Los Angeles." And and somebody once said said it to me about Banning. Oh, hockey.

[00:06:54]There are no more homeless people here than there are any place else in the country.

[00:06:59]>> And and Los Angeles is the Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the country. So naturally they're going to have a higher population of homeless people. In my whole career I spent in quality in manufacturing dealing with statistics. And one of the biggest things we we dealt with was sample size versus actual size, okay? If you're looking at 100,000 people and there's like 10 homeless people, yeah, that's not going to work out when you're talking about 100 million people, okay?

[00:07:31]It's See it for yourself. That's That's I mean, that's probably one of the biggest things that blows my mind about human beings in general is we listen to what everybody else is saying and don't bother to go confirm it for ourselves.

[00:07:49]True. It's whoever's the loudest is supposedly telling truth. Right. Which again I say bull hockey.

[00:07:56]>> [laughter] >> Which [clears throat] is amazing that people we were raised with in North Carolina and New York who had never been to California, never even been close to California had opinions about California. Yeah, I mean my parents the the far furthest they ever took me was up the East Coast to Maine.

[00:08:13]And down the East Coast to Florida to see my grandparents.

[00:08:18]They wouldn't have known California if it jumped up and bit them in the ass.

[00:08:23]>> [laughter] >> Her parents Oh, my parents never lived outside of a 1-mi radius of where 1-mi 1-hour radius of where they were born.

[00:08:34]Both of them lived within about 2 hours of their birthplace their entire lives.

[00:08:38]So it's not as if they were world travelers and had or even country travelers and had been anywhere to see anything. It's just what they'd heard, what they'd seen on television, what they'd heard from other people. And and and that's again that just really drives me insane. It's don't go by what anybody else tells you, confirm it for yourself.

[00:09:00]So far we've been satisfied here. We've been happy with for the most part with the KOA that we're staying at.

[00:09:07]Um Yeah, other than the fact that they really don't even have a maintenance crew on staff, but But they do hire people to come in once in a while and do some things. But it's it's been one of the better experiences at a RV park. And the community is a very small town that we're staying in.

[00:09:24]Redlands where I work is a much bigger city, but and then just less than 30 minutes down the road is Palm Springs.

[00:09:32]And just there's so many things to do and see within a just a day trip, it's And I mean, quite honestly, San Diego could have even been a day trip. Yeah. I mean, it's it's only about an hour and a half away. Yeah. You know, and and you can go to the beach. You can go to Redlands, as we did, and we did a video about it. If you've watched very many RV videos on YouTube, if you've seen if you follow certain channels, if you if you get into that that type of video very much because you're interested in RV living or RV travel, you will see a lot of negative about a lot of things. And I'd say I would go as far as to say it's majority negative. And a lot of that we found as we watched more and more different channels and more and more different types of channels, a lot of that is trying to get people to watch. A lot of that is sensationalism, and it's it's oh, everything's falling apart.

[00:10:31]Here's our next catastrophe. This is a horrible place. This is what these people said to me in the RV park. It's just a lot of it is sensationalism, maybe a minor incident that gets blown up to be something to get you to watch.

[00:10:43]>> Exactly. And a lot of times it's it's, you know, a minor thing went bad and broke because now we can use our sponsor.

[00:10:54]Yeah.

[00:10:54]>> [laughter] >> So, take those things with a grain of salt, and also watch some of the positive channels because a lot of them are out there, and they're showing you the great things about RV life and RV travel. And, of course, at any kind of lifestyle, things are going to go wrong, but it's not always everything going wrong all the time.

[00:11:13]I mean, this this this state has such a vast variety of different environments that you can experience from desert.

[00:11:22]Palm Springs is probably more desert than Tucson is. We were there this past week, and it was so hot. And it's like 30, 40 minutes from here.

[00:11:33]>> Yeah, and that's the funny thing. I mean, we go 30 minutes that way and come back here and it was nice out.

[00:11:38]>> Yeah, it was it was 10 or 15° cooler here.

[00:11:41]>> And as always, breezy.

[00:11:44]But it was just sand everywhere. It was just sand. I I to the to the point where I said to Cindy, I don't understand how this became like, you know, supposedly one of the homes of the rich and famous.

[00:11:56]He goes, "Why?"

[00:11:57]>> [laughter] >> Yeah. They built up the city of Palm Springs to be luxurious. But you can you can you can go from desert to forest. I mean, we go right up make a right out of this parking lot and go right up the mountain into the forest.

[00:12:13]>> Yeah. It's beautiful. To up Northern California, of course, which is mostly forested, to the ocean.

[00:12:20]>> Yeah. Okay. It's it's and all of it's beautiful. Yeah.

[00:12:24]And a lot of that is because of regulations. A lot of that is because there are a lot of environmental initiatives, there are a lot of regulations about pollution and litter and recycling and trash and no plastic bags at the grocery store that we almost forget every time to take our shopping bags in. Yeah. And Which which is this is the second time now. So, Colorado was the same thing.

[00:12:47]And all those initiatives and and policies, laws, whatever you want to call them, make a difference. When you put it all together, you can really see a big difference in the amount of litter, the amount of trash, the amount of things that are being destroyed. It's like a mindset of we're taking care of this. And and I can't repeat it enough and I know I have probably already. See it for yourself.

[00:13:11]>> [snorts] >> Experience it for yourself. Don't listen to us.

[00:13:15]Don't listen to anybody else. It's the same thing I've said about just living RV life. Don't listen to any especially her.

[00:13:26]>> [laughter] >> Experience it. Until next week, I'm Felix. I'm Cindy. We are The Roaming Gnomes. Stay safe out there.