What can you tell me about it?

Merced: Gateway to Yosemite!

Don't believe it.

Anyway, if you like lots of fog and lots of heat, with about two weeks of nice weather in the Spring and Fall separating the two, you're good to go.

I haven't lived there (lived in both Porterville and Chowchila VERY briefly and in Fresno for almost three years) but I have relatives in the hills just northeast, just beyond the University of California campus, and go there from time to time. I've heard that the city of Merced itself has become rather crime-infested, but there are still nice places to live within the city, and the schools are not too bad from what I've heard.

The LDS church doesn't have an especially strong presence, though members are represented on local school boards, I believe. There are probably 3 or 4 wards in Merced and another 2 just north in Atwater. Chowchilla is fifteen miles or so to the south, with another ward there. When I was there as a kid staying with relatives in the summer, almost half of the town dentists were LDS. The word on the street was that most of them had wanted to go into medicine but were not accepted into the med schools at which they applied in the days of affirmative action. A whole lot of those dentists have retired or passed on by now, but many of their sons are supposedly now practicing dentistry in the area, so there probably are still many LDS dentists.

The weather isn't ideal, as Chicken n. Backpacks said. It's uncomfortably warm in the summer and dangerously foggy at times in the winter. Springs and falls are entirely too short.

If there is one good thing about Merced, it would be the proximity to other places. Maybe half an hour from CA's geographic center, it's within relatively easy driving distance to almost anywhere in the state you would care to go. The SF bay area is less than two hours to the north. Sacramento (I'm not sure why a person would choose to go there, either, but if you ever need to go there) is about two hours away. Lake Tahoe is a little over three hours away.The LA area is less than four hours to the south. The Sierra Nevada range is an hour or so to the east. Skis resorts are only a couple of hours away. The Pacific ocean is 2.5 hours or so to the west - not a straight shot, but not a bad drive.

I wouldn't choose to live there. I had the chance and opted to settle elsewhere. If that's where you need to live, there are much worse places.

At least it isn't Stockton. Or Molesto.

donbagley Wrote:
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> At least it isn't Stockton. Or Molesto.

Think you might have a typo somewhere here, Don. :)

donbagley Wrote:
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> At least it isn't Stockton. Or Molesto.

Modesto and Stockton probably are worse. They may be a degree or two less extreme in temperatures, but I'll take the added heat or cold any day.

I have relatives in the area. We used to go visit often at Thanksgiving. Coming from the sunny Phoenix area, the persistent fog in Merced always seemed mystical and fun. As a kid, I wanted to live there. As an adult, I think that the fog in the winter would be a serious irritation.

I didn't find anything that charming or interesting there and it was always hotter than blazes.

Sorry to anyone who lives there and loves ur. I might not have given it a fair try.

No. Where is this magical place? If it's only half as magical as Barstow, I'm in!

cludgie Wrote:
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> No. Where is this magical place? If it's only half
> as magical as Barstow, I'm in!


Merced is on US 99 about an hour north of Fresno.

I would rate it as only 3/8 as magical as Barstow, but others may disagree.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2017 08:01PM by scmd.

scmd Wrote:
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> I would rate it as only 3/8 as magical as Barstow,
> but others may disagree.

3/8ths of 0 is still 0...:)

Blech. Barstow and Merced are cesspools. My uncle used to be a bishop in Merced.

Merced is part of the current Central Valley unemployment crisis due to California's extraordinarily bad water management policies. They're running something like 11-15% unemployment.

Get an hour outside town and there's some beautiful countryside, but the economy in Merced is crap.

Barstow I spent a decade in. Would not move back. Barstow makes its money off of transportation and the nearby Indian reservation. Economically, if you held a gun to my head and made me pick, it'd be Barstow.

I wouldn't ask for identifying information, but are you comfortable saying in what decade your uncle was a bishop in Merced? I'm not trying to guess who your uncle is. Within a decade, even if it was a decade in which I had knowledge of LDS local leadership, there would have between five and fifteen different bishops. It's just that a very general indication of the era in which you spent time in Merced would give me an idea as to what the place might have been like when you were familiar with it. But if you're not comfortable, I wouldn't want you to say.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2017 01:50AM by scmd.

2000's.

He has a last name that would lead you to believe he was of Mexican/Hispanic descent, but he's actually 100% white.

Thanks. And Merced is probably as bad now as it's ever been, at least since the 1940's. In the 70's or 80's, I was told, it was a nice place as long as you stayed on the right side of the 99. It started to lose ground to gang warfare in the 90's.

Barstow may be a cesspit, but the runoff all pools in my nearby home town. In fact, we have to re-use the runoff just to have something to drink.

They lived in a cabin without any kind of utilities, and an outdoor privy. My father worked at a local sawmill, and my mother, an RN by training, was bored out of her mind. I remember her telling a story about driving "into town" - Merced, I guess, and there was a "herd" of tarantulas crossing the road. I have never seen them travel in herds, but that was her story.

She drove over them, put the car in reverse, backed over more of them, and them kept doing it until there weren't many survivors.

That's SERIOUS boredom, in my book. After scrimping and saving for about a year, they moved to a suburb of Los Angeles, where I was born, and thence to San Diego.

To hear my mother tell it, Merced was more or less the armpit of the West, at least back then.

catnip Wrote:
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> They lived in a cabin without any kind of
> utilities, and an outdoor privy. My father worked
> at a local sawmill, and my mother, an RN by
> training, was bored out of her mind. I remember
> her telling a story about driving "into town" -
> Merced, I guess, and there was a "herd" of
> tarantulas crossing the road. I have never seen
> them travel in herds, but that was her story.
>
> She drove over them, put the car in reverse,
> backed over more of them, and them kept doing it
> until there weren't many survivors.
>
> That's SERIOUS boredom, in my book. After
> scrimping and saving for about a year, they moved
> to a suburb of Los Angeles, where I was born, and
> thence to San Diego.
>
> To hear my mother tell it, Merced was more or less
> the armpit of the West, at least back then.

Merced's not a great deal better or worse than a whole lot of other San Joaquin Valley towns. If you lived in the S.J. Valley, probably whatever town you lived in was the worst. If I personally had to name the single worst town in the valley, I would probably choose Parlier, Dinuba, or Livingston, or anywhere in Kern County. The tiny towns are the very worst in my opinion. Probably because of dust bowl migrants landing there, many inexpensive dwellings without plumbing or electricity were around in the valley as late as the 40's or maybe even early 50's.

I'm not disputing the tarantula story in any way. It's the sort of thing that would have embedded itself in your mom's memory. I can say that the Merced area isn't especially overrun with tarantulas. Foothill areas of the Sierra Nevada are worse. I saw them travel in herds in the areas surrounding the summer camp I attended as a kid in the hills. Nowhere in California compares to Hawaii, where I spent the first six years or so of my life, in terms of tarantulas.

The entire valley is quite dismal. My relatives who live there do so because they own dairies, and it's a good location for dairies. Even they live basically in the foothills, though some of their dairies are on the valley floor.

I've always dreamed of going to Hawaii. I'm probably too old and creaky now to try to get back up on a board like I did as a kid in SoCal, but I would SO like to take a final shot at it before throwing in the towel!

But if I have to be constantly on the lookout for tarantulas in Hawaii, I dunno. I HATE those things.

catnip Wrote:
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> I've always dreamed of going to Hawaii. I'm
> probably too old and creaky now to try to get back
> up on a board like I did as a kid in SoCal, but I
> would SO like to take a final shot at it before
> throwing in the towel!
>
> But if I have to be constantly on the lookout for
> tarantulas in Hawaii, I dunno. I HATE those
> things.

Mostly you have to go looking for tarantulas to be bothered by them, though I remember having a couple in our house in Laie. The hotels depend upon recommendations from tourists and are better maintained than the faculty housing in Laie. You're probably safe.

I have ridden in a Mercedes.

But not in CA.

smirkorama Wrote:
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> But not in CA.

If you rode in a Mercedes in the wrong part of Merced, it would soon be the property of someone else, at least in the sense of possession being 9/10 of the law.

Before the white man "improved" it, the SJV was supposedly a pretty nice place--ponds, rivers, marshes, Tule elk, migrating birds, "big cats", not just up north, but all the way down to Tejon Ranch....