The Orange county area is highly unique in that it is a very planned development area, with massive chunks of development being done by people like the Irvine Company–an offshoot of an old family with a lot of land. Some people like to describe this as “plastic” or “cookie cutter,” but there are advantages and disadvantages to this:
Advantages:
I’ve lived in a fair amount of geo’s–Silicon Valley, Seattle, Raleigh, Minnesota–and I am truly amazed at the quality of the bike lanes in the Orange County area. The amount of “off road” bike paths isn’t all that great, but the main “on road” wide streets with “bike lane” markings is really unparalleled. They are all over the place, and you would be hard pressed to find a better geo. In other words, if you like riding streets with wide shoulders, you can’t do better. Here is a link to a local map.
As somebody mentioned before, Santiago Canyon is a gem that must be done to be appreciated.
The weather is about 6-8 degrees warmer than San Jose (where I used to live) in Orange county. This is very workable for riding. As you get farther back into the foothills and away from the ocean, you will find the area gets very toasty during the summer.
Trail running is superb. Really good as you simply reuse the mountain bike trails. The best link for all the mountain biking (ala trail running) can be found here. If you like mountain biking, Orange county has been called the mountain bike capital of the world, and I believe it. The amount of mountain biking distracts from all the other sports. How does it compare to the bay area? I would say “different.” The bay area has a lot more wooded areas. The biking down here is more desert biking.
Swimming and swimming pools: Orange county has a strong legacy of Olympic class swimmers. There are a lot of competitive swim clubs. Most of the YMCAs are really very good.
For business, there are a lot of very, very good public golf courses. Great place to do business on the course.
Disadvantages:
There really aren’t crushingly hard mountain ascents that go on for miles. I can’t think of anything like a “Mt Hamilton” type of climb on the road. If you are willing to do you’re biking on the trail, then there are a bunch of crushingly hard climbs around the Saddleback mountain area. You just can’t find them on the street. You can get a fair amount of climbing in, however. As an example, my “flattish” route today had around 1350 ft of climbing in 21 miles (using the old Avocet 50 algorithm).
As I already stated, the temperature is a bit higher than in the bay area. This is great during the winter, but you need to acclimate during the summer.
Housing and business rental is high. You need to get to about Costa Mesa and Northwards before the rents go down. Also, closer to the ocean is much higher rents.
Poor longer racing support. This one surprises me, since the trainings is so good, but there are no 1/2 ironman events in Orange county. In Walnut creek you are very close to a whole bunch of brilliant tri’s: Vineman, World’s Toughest, Caliman, etc. However, at least we have Ironman California just an hour away as a token.
Theo
Thanks everyone for your thoughts thus far, please please please keep em coming!