Today marks one year since my wife and I moved from Chicago to Northern California as I look back on the experience and my first year in the Golden State.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve held a deep fascination with the state of California.
Maybe it was the picturesque views I’d see on TV while watching late-night west coast baseball with my dad as a kid, or perhaps the virtually perfect climate of Southern California being prominently displayed in the slew of Nickelodeon shows I took in growing up. Either way, I was permanently fascinated by what life might be like out west, and I wanted nothing more than to visit.
The visits I had to California over the years didn’t do much to change my initial perception or make me think that I was wrong for idealizing the state. I was completely enamored with the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas upon my first trips there in 2013 and 2014, respectively, knowing I had only hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything the country’s most populated state has to offer.
But as far as me actually living here? I never could have imagine that there would be a day where my wife and I would wake up in a hotel in Reno to complete our long voyage out to our current hometown in Chico, California, a drive we completed 365 days ago today.
The wildest thing about it all is that it was only quite recently that living in California even felt like an objective or possibility of ours as we were establishing our lives in Chicago throughout the earlier part of this decade.
My wife, who is currently an assistant professor at California State University, Chico, had initially sought to seek a job at a university in Canada, with our long-term plan having been to emigrate upon my wife receiving her Ph.D and applying for a professor position.
For other curious Americans who have thought about escaping to our neighbors to the north due to the routine gun violence and crippling health care system, just know that it is every bit as hard as it looks!
While there is certainly a universe where my wife and I move to Canada and make things work, the barriers to a stable, successful life were plentiful had we decided to move to another country. In addition to housing expenses even making much of California look like a bargain in comparison, rather strict immigration employment laws and sponsorship requirements make it easier said than done to find employment in the True North.
In May 2024, shortly before our wedding and around one year before my wife received her Ph.D, we officially decided to change course – shifting our focus to a professor position for my wife within the United States – albeit in a state that doesn’t have a slew of far-right laws that infringe even more on education than what the federal government is already doing.
As far as my employment, there was also a mutual decision that a job for my wife would take complete precedence. Having worked in Chicago news media for over four years at the time, only New York City and Los Angeles would offer pay raises, with every other market being a step backwards in the world of news. As I was beginning to burn out over the general stress of covering news in a fascist regime, I wasn’t exactly clamoring to hold on to that line of work.
From that point on, California seemed to become a real possibility. In addition to the sheer wealth of universities within the state, my wife’s educational background being in computer science is a perfect match for what has long been the epicenter of technological innovation within the U.S. – further aided by the fact that her advisor during her Ph.D program is a Fresno native herself.
By the end of 2024, my wife had attended in-person interviews at University of California, Riverside and California State University, Chico – the latter of which offered her the position at an incredible rate that honestly made the move a very easy decision.
Despite having only visited the two large coastal metropolitan areas in California to this point, I was fiercely confident that I was going to love Chico – with me outright deciding that I didn’t need to see the city first before we made the official call to move there.
Similar to how I committed to the University of Missouri without ever visiting the school’s campus, sometimes you just know a match made in heaven before even seeing it for yourself, and I fell in love with Chico upon our first visit to the city in April 2025.
Chico is not at all what people imagine when they think of California. Located in the northern reaches of the state’s Central Valley around 90 miles north of Sacramento, Chico is nestled in a region of the state that is both surrounded by serene natural beauty while not exactly being much of a tourist destination at all.
After a year of being there, I honestly feel like my wife and I are living in one of America’s true hidden gems, an overlooked city of just over 100,000 people that most outside of California have never heard of, with a comparatively affordable cost of living and plenty of scenic nature in the surrounding areas.
Traffic is never too much of an issue. The climate, while not at all the dreamlike weather of much of coastal California, is still echelons better than what we are used to in the Midwest, with hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters providing a nice change of pace from the summer humidity and winter snow we are accustomed to.
Of course, there are notable adjustments that were made after moving from a globally-renowned city to a college town most people have never heard of. After living 20 minutes away from one of the world’s busiest airports, it now takes a solid 90-minute drive to get on a plane at Sacramento International Airport – which offers a fraction of the destinations one could access at O’Hare in Chicago.
Similarly, you probably need to make the same drive to take in any sporting events or concerts, another notable lifestyle change after being a short Uber ride away from a wide range of marquee events for most of my adult life.
Despite feeling for much of my 20s that I would be happiest in a large city, I feel like I’m where I should be with where my life is currently at – something that has allowed me to put the daily work into this website as my primary focus.
Maybe it’s just the way my brain was warped after working in a busy news market for 5.5 years, but there’s a noticeable difference when you’re living somewhere that isn’t the focus of national events on a frequent basis. Things feel detached and relatively far away most of the time, a kind of feeling that I hadn’t really experienced since I was a student at the University of Missouri.
I’ll never stop believing that Chicago is the best city in the world. The bang-for-your-buck in just about every regard within the Windy City is unmatched, providing probably around 70-75% of what New York City does with a small fraction of the inconvenience that is The Big Apple. Chicago is fucking incredible, and just about everybody on the planet should visit at least once in your life. If you’re from the Midwest, I’d even argue that you should live there for at least a little bit.
But the damndest thing is outside of my family and friends that remain in the region, I really don’t miss it at all. I thought I would miss it much more than I actually do. While I undoubtedly wish Chico had a quarter of the culinary scene that Chicago does, I don’t exactly miss waiting for buses that never show up, the constant loud noise that makes it impossible to truly wind down or relax or the increasingly fucked up weather that turned what were pleasant summers into seasons of floods, tornadoes and dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke.
Obviously, there is no escaping the climate crisis – a fact laid incredibly bare by the reality in Chico, where thousands of residents are natives of nearby Paradise, which burned to the ground in 2018 during the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.
It’s a world of picking your poison when it comes to the climate crisis, and we feel about as good as we could with the poisons of extreme heat (which is inescapable), winter floods and the constant possibility of nearby wildfires where we are.
Even though it’s been a full year, I still really can’t believe that we live in California, the place I spent most of my childhood dreaming of living. What blows my mind even more is that it really has lived up to everything I imagined it would be – and the mental boost that comes from bike rides surrounded by sunshine and palm trees with the Coastal Ranges and Sierra Nevada off in the distance is immeasurable.
It may be trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego for most out-of-state and international tourists, but just about every square inch of California has some sort of natural beauty within it, no matter if you’re someone that’s into surfing, biking, mountain climbing or snowboarding. It’s all here, and I don’t think I’ll have it any other way from here on out.
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