Growing up in the eastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, I remember everything fun: San Francisco, Oakland, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, and Southern California were all far away. San Francisco was the closest, but the traffic required to get into and out of the city always made it feel further than it really was. Lake Tahoe and Yosemite were always about three hours away, and Southern California, where Disneyland and a lot of other fun theme parks are, took about eight hours of driving. My dad used to have to commute to Berkeley growing up, so he was gone for about 12 hours, as it took nearly two hours just to get to and from work. As being a Californian became more expensive, going anywhere began to feel suffocating.
The point here is that the Bay Area is a place where everything feels far away, expensive, or both. Whether you’re driving from the East Bay to San Francisco, heading down to San Jose…..