Redlands had an aura of exoticism to me.
Not simply that it was not San Diego, rather that its differences-within-similarities gave it its own feel. Freeways were different, for instance in places more elevated, the 15E to 10 interchange for example. But perhaps it was the orange trees, the remnants of the groves that were everywhere. There was nothing like this in my part of Southern California. It was a different culture, a holdover from a different era. And of course the beautiful mountains that were a literal stone's throw away.
Mostly it was the University itself. Its strange conservativism, its aping of Ivy League pretentiousness while at the same time being so militantly mediocre. It was its huge open quad, the big lawns, its strange security force with its bullet-headed lack of empathy or concern for students. It was the hostility between the University and Johnston. It was the Johnston students' elitism. I'd encountered elitism before in the gifted program but I didn't remember the other students being hostile to them, more that the other students didn't know they existed.
It was the drive on 15E, the dry hills covered with boulders. It was the drive on 10 west from Redlands into Los Angeles, when we had outings to the opera or when we went to the airport to leave for Greece. It was the unfathomable hugeness of L.A., where Redlands was its eastern rampart. It was driving up into the mountains, eating at the San Gregorio Lodge. Or driving into Mentone for donuts at 3am.
All of this was foreign in a way that felt both adventurous and a little bit alien. It was a widening of what I knew, and, to use later language, a decentering. Where my west-of-I-5 San Diegan experience became part of a larger context, and was no longer exclusively home.