This page describes Redlands, California as a frozen-in-time snapshot of our views when we lived there from December 2003 to December 2006, before returning to England.

Redlands

The city of Redlands is about 70 miles East from Los Angeles, in California, USA.

It has a population in 2003 of about 60,000. It lies in the San Bernadino valley near the I10 Interstate, about half way between LA and Palm Springs.

It has a history and some old (by American standards) houses, as it was the centre of the Navel orange-growing industry. It also has nearby some impressive mountains and deserts.

Unfortunately it gets a lot of the smog blown up the valley from LA, and is very hot in July and August (100F, 40C). It also has been eaten in the last few years by the LA sprawl, so house prices have rocketed, most of the orange groves have been chopped down and replaced by faceless warehouses, estates of closely packed houses, and shopping malls.

See the city newspaper web site for more information.
Redlands location

Finding us in Redlands

See the page on Directions to Redlands Lawn and Tennis.

We Move to Redlands

We left Comberton at the end of December 2003 to set up home in Redlands, as Paul has been working for ESRI Inc. We moved back to the UK at the start of 2007.

Work in USA

Paul enjoyed the work at ESRI, which was a good mix of internal technical project work and an outward facing role as evangalist for the company's cartographic capabilities.

The real catch is that Margaret could not work as she only has a visa as an "Accompanying Alien Spouse", and in 2004 getting a work permit is near impossible given the current mix of illegal immigrant hype and anti-terrorist paranoia. It typically takes six years to get a Green Card as a permanent resident alien. As a result, she was bored and homesick.

The saving grace has been the Children's Forest up the hill in the San Bernardino mountains at 7000 feet, where she has been doing voluntarary work, and spending most of her days.

Impressions of Life in USA

As someone once said "there are only really two differences between the Brits and the Americans: Brits think 100 miles is a long distance, and Americans think 100 years is a long time!". This is at the heart of all the other differences. It's a vast country. California is three times the size of England. The people are so far from anywhere non-US, that they are very insular. They are outwardly friendly, but difficult to get to know.

Conclusions

We don't regret going to Redlands - everyone ought to have the opportunity to live in another culture at leaast once in their life, but we left it a bit late, and prefer to be back in Europe.


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