Sacramento, the state capitol of California where Governor Schwarzenegger resides, is 370 miles north of LA, about the same distance from Baltimore to Boston; yet all in the same state. My friend PS from graduate school lives there now and works as a public librarian. It’s a smaller city of 450,000, with another million or so living in the sprawled out suburbs. The area was first settled by Swiss immigrant John Sutter in 1839, when California was still part of Mexico. The weather is the same as sunny LA, although a bit colder in winter and with a bit more greenery. San Francisco and Reno, Nevada are within a couple hours drive. The downtown is laid out like an old west town, with boardwalk sidewalks and Victorian buildings. Sactown in definitely a more affordable alternative to SoCal. During the drive north I passed through hundreds of miles of dry grasslands and mountains, where there were large ranches with tens of thousands of heads of cattle, and also tens of thousands of square miles of agriculture. To make that all work, along with providing enough water for the highly populated desert of southern California, a series of aqueducts divert water hundred of miles south, which are visible along Interstate 5. Also visible are vast areas of burned out grasslands. A single cigarette tossed out a car window can easily burn thousands of acres in the summer, one of the reasons why littering is punishable by a $1000 fine.