“As soon as I drove into Texas, literally, as soon as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, like, ‘This is wonderful,’ ” says Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-old portrait photographer from Orange County, Calif.

“People weren’t wearing masks — nobody cared. It’s kind of like heaven on earth.”

She says when the state of California forced her to close her photography studio over COVID-19 restrictions, she and her husband, a retired newspaper editor, knew it was time to “escape.”

America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.

“We felt very out of place and very uncomfortable at times,” says Tiffany Wooten, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom whose family recently relocated from conservative Indiana to liberal Austin. “We were looking at blue cities because we wanted to be with our own people.”