We Moved Back to California

Loving our years in Wisconsin, and why California's policies pulled us back

Big announcement: we’ve moved back to California, the solarpunk state, as we’ve taken to calling it half joking and half completely serious.

After a few years enjoying the lakes and prairies of Wisconsin and building real community in Madison, we’ve headed back to the Bay Area, a state with strong solarpunk ideals and a much easier place to live car-free. It’s a decision we thought about for a long time, packed and unpacked in our heads more times than we can count, and it’s not really a story of “Wisconsin bad, California good.” It’s more complicated than that, so we wanted to actually write it out instead of leaving it as a two line announcement.

The move itself was its own small adventure, and admittedly not our most solarpunk one, starting with the fact that we bought an actual car just before we left Wisconsin, our first in years. We packed a shipping pod for the stuff that couldn’t come with us any other way, and within about a day it had been quietly taken over by bikes and ebike parts, to the point where we started joking that a recumbent bike with a fiberglass shell is honestly more useful than a couch anyway, so why not let it win the space. We drove the rest of the way out in our new, decidedly non-solar car, stopping to see an old friend from the New Mexico leg of our original cross-country trip years earlier, and swinging through the Grand Canyon along the way. We used the drive to scout out whether the Grand Canyon might actually be reachable by public transit on some future trip, which felt like the least we could do to make peace with the contradiction.

What we’ll miss

Madison gave us more than we expected when we first moved there. We built a real community, the kind that actually showed up. Friends who joined us on adventures again and again, out to Blue Mounds more times than we can count, out to Glacier National Park as a group of four, down to Milwaukee just because. Friends we spent a real stretch of time trying to build cohousing with, an idea that eventually fell apart once all of us sat down and realized none of us actually had the money to pull it off, which stung more than we expected going in. Friends doing genuine work in local politics too, on reproductive health access and on YIMBY housing policy, the unglamorous kind of organizing that actually moves things. And friends we co-founded a nonprofit carshare with, something we’d built from nothing and had actually gotten to the piloting stage, several thousand dollars in grant funding secured, before we ever bought a single car for it. Walking away from that unfinished was genuinely painful, more for one of us than the other if we’re being honest, but moving still mattered enough that we made the call together and did it anyway.

Some of our favorite Midwest memories weren’t even the trips we hosted for others. There was a weekend in Sparta, which bills itself, not without some justification, as the bicycling capital of the world. The highlight was biking through the converted train tunnels on the Elroy-Sparta State Trail, one of them three quarters of a mile long and genuinely a little scary in the pitch dark with water dripping somewhere you couldn’t see, which made it the perfect activity for spooky season. Sparta itself had a lot of fun bike kitsch too, including what might be the longest tandem bike either of us has ever laid eyes on, propped up somewhere downtown like a monument to a very specific kind of enthusiasm.

And there was a proper winter backpacking overnight on the Superior Hiking Trail, in Tettegouche State Park, over the holiday break one year, our first real winter overnight. We’ll admit it wasn’t our most solarpunk trip on paper, since we carpooled with friends to get there, 60 miles out from Duluth, rather than reaching it under our own power. But it gave us a local, remote backpacking trip just one state away, and the payoff was worth the asterisk. The trail runs high along cliffs overlooking Lake Superior, and we got lucky with a soft, steady snowfall that made the whole thing feel like Big Sur if it could somehow get snowed in, all dramatic coastline and quiet white drifts at the same time. Not the easiest trip we’ve ever done, but exactly the kind of thing that made the long Midwest winters feel worth it.

Superior Hiking Trail winter backpacking

None of that is small. We don’t want this post to read like we’re dismissing four years of a place that genuinely shaped how we travel and who we travel with.

Why California, though

We should be honest that this wasn’t purely a transit and bike infrastructure decision, much as we’d love to claim it was. The 2024 election results left us genuinely nervous about the idea of starting a family in a state with a Republican controlled legislature, and that fear was a real part of what got us moving. We also ran into a much more mundane realization somewhere in the planning: a car turns out to be close to mandatory for the first year of a baby’s life no matter where you live in this country. Most hospitals won’t even let you leave with a newborn without one, car seat checked and installed, so all our car-light ideals were going to run into that wall eventually regardless of which state we ended up in.

So we can’t honestly say we moved to California to be car-free, and we’re not, not anymore, car keys included. What we can say is that we can still get to dramatically more places without that car here than we ever could in Wisconsin, which matters even with one sitting in the driveway now. So much of what we care about, sustainable transit, bike infrastructure, climate policy that actually treats the problem like it’s real instead of a talking point, is just easier to live inside of here. We didn’t want to keep fighting our own state’s infrastructure just to live the way we already believe in, spending our energy working around a system instead of just living inside one that mostly agrees with us. California isn’t perfect, not even close, and we’re not naive enough to pretend otherwise. But between the politics and the practical reality of a baby on the way, its policies point in the direction we’re trying to walk, and that matters more than we expected it to before we actually lived somewhere that didn’t.

So: new state, new car we didn’t expect to own again, same values underneath it all, and a backlog of Midwest memories we’re genuinely grateful for. On to the next chapter, wherever the trains and buses, and apparently now the car too, decide to take us next.