Napa, California

Napa, California, is where J.D. Vance’s first visit to California became a turning point in how he understood regional difference and his own hillbilly identity. Uncle Jimmy flew Vance and Lindsay Leigh Lewis to his home there, giving the children an adventure that carried them beyond familiar family road trips and into a world Vance remembered as almost another country.

The Visit and Its Setting

Before the trip, Vance had traveled out of state with his grandparents, including to South Carolina and Texas, and had visited Kentucky regularly. Those journeys mostly kept him among family and places that felt familiar. Napa, by contrast, became the base for a California visit filled with new surroundings and experiences.

The trip also revealed how closely his friends associated travel with money. When Vance told people he would be flying to California, their first response was disbelief that Uncle Jimmy could afford to fly two children who were not his own. Vance later recognized that this response reflected the class consciousness of his childhood: the cost of the plane ticket eclipsed the prospect of the journey itself.

The Journey West

Vance was thrilled by his first flight, a six-hour trip from Cincinnati, Ohio, to San Francisco. He stayed awake despite the early departure, captivated by the shrinking earth at takeoff, the clouds viewed at close range, the vast sky, and the mountains seen from above. Before the flight reached Colorado, the attentive flight attendant had made it possible for him to visit the cockpit regularly. The pilot gave him brief flying lessons and updates on their progress.

That airborne view was part of the trip’s force: California was not simply farther away than the places Vance already knew, but a new scale of landscape and possibility. His excitement began before he reached Napa, and the first flight itself became one of the defining memories of the visit.

Adventures in California

During the stay, Vance spent his days with teenage cousins and their friends, with each day bringing a different activity. The group went to the Castro District of San Francisco so that an older cousin, Rachael, could challenge Vance’s assumptions about gay people. They also visited a winery and helped Nate, a cousin, at his high school football practice. The range of outings made California feel markedly unlike home.

The visit also made Vance’s own regional identity audible to other people. Those he met thought he sounded as though he came from Kentucky; Vance accepted the comparison, noting that he was, in a sense, from Kentucky. Rather than resent their reaction, he enjoyed being told that his accent was funny. The encounter turned speech into a marker of difference, but one he could regard with amusement as well as recognition.

Cultural Distance and Recognition

Vance had already visited places including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and Lexington, and had spent considerable time in South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Yet California struck him as distinctly different. In retrospect, he explains the contrast through the hillbilly highway: his earlier travels had largely kept him among people who looked and acted like his family, shared their foods and sports, and practiced the same religion. The journey to Napa and the wider California excursions therefore exposed a cultural distance that geography alone did not explain.

That recognition connects the trip to Vance’s earlier sense of kinship with families in a crowded courtroom. He later understood those strangers as hillbilly transplants, like his own family. Napa did not erase that sense of belonging; it helped him see both its reach and its boundaries. The trip’s decisive significance lies in making a familiar regional culture visible by placing it beside a world that felt different.