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For me, it's April 17th, 2006. That's the day I arrived in Texas to stay. I came out here in advance of my family, as part of moving my employer's company from North Hollywood to Dallas. We left because California business regulations made being a once prosperous small print shop in that state into a losing proposition. My wife and son had to stay behind until the end of the school year, in June. I lived in a hotel in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas for the first 6 weeks or so that I was here. Then I got an apartment in Grapevine toward the end of May, because we knew that's the city we wanted to live in, and I needed a place for us to stay while we shopped for a house. I made 2 trips back to Pasadena during that time. We had sold our house in early May (for more than 3X what we had paid for it 7 years earlier), with a 30 day escrow, so I went back once in late May to get us moved out of that house, and loaded almost all of our belongings onto a freight trailer bound for Texas. The rest went temporarily to my in-laws' house, just a couple of miles away, along with my wife and son until it was time for them to leave. My second trip back was in late June, to get my family, and caravan back to Texas with a trailer containing the rest of our stuff. We bought our Grapevine house in July of 2006 on a 2-week escrow, and we established our "official" residency here that month.

I've been back to California every year and a half to two years to visit with family, but on our last trip, in December of 2018, we determined that would be our final trip. I'm not going back again for fun. I'll make the trip one more time when my mom passes ... which won't be too much longer ... but California isn't the same anymore. It's lost all of its former charm. I feel like I can't breathe whenever I go back, so to heck with it.