California is a different world east of I5. In fact all the pacific states are completely different East of I5.
There’s a lot of red west of i5 also.
We lived for a year in Palos Verdes, on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Spectacular year. Most of our driving was along the coast and inland to the deserts. Illinois, where I was raised, is so flat that you see forever. The east coast, where we’ve lived for forty years, is so overgrown with trees and such that you need to find beauty in the closeup plants and forget what distance feels like. Obviously, we’re not on the coast. Sigh.