Understand and bemoan all you wrote about driving.
Add in rain and snow, which we see little to none of here, southern Calif.
It’s kinda funny that I still enjoy driving!
Have I said on this thread that I was a Long Islander from birth up until 1957 - ?
With occasional visits back to see relatives.
What NY has better than here, is very good deli’s. They are ‘here’ but closer to Los Angeles.
Friends who grew up here and moved to California thought the pizza here (NYC metro area) was so much better as well.
Long Island seems to have some of the same problems as the Jersey shore; for example, the roads connecting them to the nearest cities were never designed for year-round commuter traffic. In NJ more and more people are moving to the shore (either building homes or winterizing existing shore houses), and the traffic as they drive to & from work in northeastern NJ is horrendous (the roads aren’t made for that volume).