The great thing about a blog is that you can write about anything you want. In the town we used to live in, I wrote a opinion/local talk newspaper column for nine years, and thankfully was granted that same privilege -- within limits. I got into trouble once for writing a negative column on the city turning our local farmers' market into "Thursday Night Marketplace," complete with drinking, loud music and flea market style booths.
That piece, I took flak for. Not from my editors, but from the readers and the organization who had come up with or agreed to the concept of a Farmers Market where you could get drunk, urinate on the side streets and get arrested for disorderly conduct on the asphalt, all when it's 115 degrees on Main Street in July.
To each his own, I guess. The Thursday Night Marketplace still exists, I'd bet, but we're here, in the midst of a better life. Yet we won't be retiring here. And what I'm about to say could provoke the ire of people in this town the way my Farmers' Market piece once did in the old town, if I published it in the paper. It's the dirty little secret about living here no one talks about.
We are going to retire elsewhere because of the exorbitant, ridiculous cost of living here. If you're making this town a weekend destination -- a treat for you and your significant person -- it's a great place to come. There are exciting restaurants to be dined in, a couple of hundred tasting rooms, boutiques, and everything else you'd want to fulfill your "weekend destination lifestyle."
But pay attention to what I just said. It's perfect for lifestyle. And a lifestyle is very different than a life.
Lifestyle towns are the places you go to on vacation and dream of living in someday ... Catalina Island. Banff. Provence. Key West. You see yourself in some imaginary future, meandering through scenic vistas to your favorite quaint little breakfast place each morning, where they know your name and where you'll linger over coffee as the colorful storefronts open up to sell their wares. In the evenings, you will sit out on your patio with a night sky full of stars and a glass of wine in your hand as gentle breezes caress you.
After having these visions, you will pick up the real estate section, and begin your quest for what you think will be a better life than the one you're living. And yes, all those lovely images will happen for you if you move here. They really will. But they come at a price. Literally.
Everything costs more -- a lot more -- when you live in a destination versus just a place. Whether it's groceries, the services of a plumber, a contractor, or a nanny, you're going to pay a huge premium.
Shopping for cute, touristy gifts is a breeze here, but staples are often hard to come by. And don't even start on medical care. The best doctor in town is a boutique doc who charges $1,800/year for his services, on top of your regular co-pay. The other choices are frankly, frightening, and I've heard more than one story of bad medical care that borders on malpractice from other, nameless docs around. I am guessing this is because doctors don't move here to publish, do research, or advance their names in the medical industry. They move here for the same reasons most do...to go wine tasting and maybe buy a boat or something.
But the saddest thing is that for native residents, they can no longer offer their children a place in the city's future, because their kids will probably never be able to afford a home or even rent a place on their own here.
So it comes down to two things: Are you awake enough to see this, or have you willed yourself into a sort of dream consciousness, where you accept the gouging, the inflation and the growth as the cost of living here -- the necessary price for the scenic vistas, quaint breakfast place and night sky full of stars?
I will be honest with you. We moved here for a life -- cleaner air, lower unemployment, better weather -- but instead have found lifestyle, which we always thought was just a small part of living here as a resident. It turns out Lifestyle has taken the wheel and is driving this town towards whatever its ultimate destination is.
With less water to go around, more development going in at every turn, and the weekend visitors believing this is the place to be more than ever, I'm guessing that destination is a dead end. For us, anyway.
Turns out, all we wanted was a life. Which sounds easy enough, until you have to contend with the fact that a life is a very different thing than a lifestyle.
You know what they say about lifestyle destinations: a nice place to visit, but...
When I'm working at the winery, I'm often asked by customers what it's like to live here, amidst the vine-covered hillsides, the wineries and the tasting rooms. Mostly the question comes from folks visiting on weekend jaunts from Los Angeles or the Bay Area. They find a winery, sit under an oak tree surrounded by colorful vines and just take a breath and relax. They talk about how they long to get out of the city and find a slower and more peaceful existence.
There's certainly some good geographic public relations that goes on in the longing for wine country, since some of the most beautiful places on earth are also ones where wine is grown. And it's been that way for at least a couple of thousand years. Wine culture is rooted in the histories of some of the most sublime, temperate places on the planet. And I'm not sure people would be dreaming of being here quite as much if kumquats were our chief product. Something about being around all this wine makes people think their lives will be just one long pour, smooth on the palate with a lovely finish.
They're kind of right in most of their assumptions. It is amazing living here. There is wine everywhere, and even the most backwater resident, with no interest in wine whatsoever, generally still manages to acquire some wine knowledge and usually more bottles of it than they know what to do with. It's currency here.
Business meetings generally feature wine. Grocery stores offer wine tasting. And most public events, like concerts in the park, allow -- no, expect -- you to be bringing wine to them. You could walk down the street with a bottle of wine (open or not) and no one would interfere with you, because we see it every day.
But because of the wine industry, we are also a tourist town, and there are negatives that come with that.
We have traffic, for instance. Traffic made worse by wine tasters clearing out the tasting rooms (all 250 of them) late in the afternoons, especially on weekends. My dad was a cop, and always told me that you can tell drunk drivers not by their speed, but by the fact that they drive badly at very slow speeds. Dad was right. I've seen the most bone-headed driving decisions in my life since living here. Probably made by people who were either drunk or hung over.
Being a tourist town also means we cater to, curry favor with and try and impress the outsider -- not the resident. So we have incredible restaurants but horrible, understocked and overcrowded grocery stores. We have charming boutiques, but the nearest Macy's is over an hour from home. Large furniture store? Forget it. And if you want your roof fixed, better get on a four month waiting list, because the few contractors who work in this area are loathe to take on small jobs. It's just too expensive to live here to make charging less than a fortune a worthwhile thing. Why patch a residential roof when you can help put one on a new tasting room?
The roads around town also reflect this attitude. Since I've lived here (we arrived in 2012) they have re-done all the roads around the downtown City Park twice (for tourism) but the road in front of the local baseball fields (for residents) is so pothole-filled and old I figure damage must have come from wagon wheels back in the 1800s.
In other words, we put our best face on for those coming to see us from elsewhere. And once you decide to live here, that's when you see the other side.
It just goes to show that everything, and I mean everything, has problems. Trade spouses, careers, homes or locales and you will find positives and negatives. Most of the time, unless things are really bad, the trick is to learn to live with the good and accept the bad. Or take a risk and change things up, move, break out of a relationship or start a new job and basically turn your Scrabble letters in for a whole new set.
It's a personal decision, and one which is not to be made lightly. Because, just like the Scrabble game, while life's problematic "z's" and the "q's" are hard to manage, there is always a chance that in turning in your letters you'll end up with far worse -- maybe five vowels, an "x" and a "w."
And you can't do much with that once it happens.
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| Weekenders |
One of the things I'm discovering about living here is what it means to live in a tourist town. Paso Robles is considered a destination vacation for a great many people, mainly from Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as other large cities within a three or four hour drive. There are also international tourists who stop here from all points on the globe as they travel across California on big vacations. In short, during spring, summer and fall, it gets busy around here!
Mostly, our tourism comes from the wine business, which means those grapes not only produce delicious wines but also bring cash to area businesses and local government from restaurants, hotels and taxes. But living in a tourist town is not always easy, I'm telling you. That's because when you live here, you often find yourself working when the rest of the world seems to be playing.
On weekends, for instance, the wineries and downtown streets are fairly bustling with out of town guests -- families, groups of women doing "girls' weekends," and of course couples. And sometimes it's hard to farm, knowing that there's so much fun going on so close by. Sometimes, in the evenings, we can faintly hear the music from the events held at a winery just to the north of us, and it feels a little like we're missing out on the party, as we sit in our living room watching an episode of "House Hunters" after a long day of working outside.
That's because there's an unwritten law of living in a tourist town: Just because you live in a tourist town, it does not mean you can party all the time. Well, you can, there are certainly enough parties around to do that, but then you'll never get anything else done.
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| Bacchus lives here |
The same thing goes for wine drinking. When you first move here, you wake up every morning astonished that you do, in fact, actually live in WINE COUNTRY (your first incentive of the day to open a bottle and celebrate). You drive past vineyards on your way to, well, anywhere. And tasting rooms abound in Paso Robles the way slot machines abound in Vegas -- they are everywhere. The first time I went to the supermarket here, I saw people wine tasting, in the supermarket ... at 8 a.m.
Truly, you could drink every day and night here and still never manage to taste all the wonderful wines made in this area, but, when it comes right down to it, you shouldn't, in the same way you shouldn't be at the Factory Store everyday if you happen to live next to the Hershey's Chocolate Plant.
But, I won't lie, living in this environment is always a tempting proposition. The compromise we've reached so far is to enjoy downtown on weeknights, when it's mostly locals, and enjoy events at the winery we belong to and, very occasionally at others. We have to limit ourselves, or we'd just never get any work done.
And if I sound like I'm complaining, I most certainly am not. It's just that, after living for 20 years in a place where there was never anything going on, living in a place where there's always something happening has been an adjustment, because it involves sometimes just saying "no thanks" and staying home.
And while home is a great place to be, sometimes when I hear that music down the hill, I realize I could get carried away into the Land of Bacchus, the God of Wine, a little too easily. And it's then I plant my feet on my hill and turn my eyes to the simple bounty of the trees, plants and flowers that come from our own earth. And open a bottle of wine and celebrate that.
