I've moved around way too much over my life, all over the country and internationally too, but California is where I have spent most of my time. I lived in a number of different cities across the state and I have noticed that California is probably our most diverse state in terms of both people's attitudes and environmentally, but people don't often see it that way. Instead either they assume the entire state is like the places they have been or is all like the stereotypes they have heard.
There are big cities here. -Very- big cities, too big of cities. But drive up the coast from San Francisco or into the mountains or the desert or the huge areas of farmland in the central valley and you can just get away from it all.
People think of it as being dry here because the south is more of a desert, but get to the north and you have a climate similar to Oregon with wet winters to the west and snowy ones on the east.
A lot of people have said its too hot, but I spent a winter living where I could walk from my house to where the donner party's camp was. People forget that half the Sierra-Nevada mountains are in California. The central valley and south eastern desert are really hot in the summer, but the whole coast line stays pretty temperate all year long.
The other thing I see mentioned a lot are natural disasters. We have them, earthquakes, mudslides, fires. Everyplace else has their own natural disasters too though and the ones here don't occur with any more frequency, its just easy to think something is odd that doesn't happen often near you. Earthquakes that you can actually feel are extremely few and far between, like unless you live directly on the fault line you will go years without actually feeling one and probably go your whole life without having one cause damage to your stuff. Fires and mudslides are just because the south doesn't get much rain. Californians tend to look at the rest of the country in the same way as they do us in this regard. 'Who would be crazy enough to live where there are tornados, or hurricanes or blizzards?'
