Johnny McElree was exhausted. He and his family had been driving for days across the Midwest, his father pursuing a new career in California. The land was flat, the weather hot and dry, and Johnny, a boy of merely four-years-old, was getting stir crazy. They'd passed through farmland and desert with nothing but the hope of a new opportunity on the horizon. When they hit the California border, Johnny's eyes had never been wider. A palm tree stood taller than anything he'd ever seen, its fronds swaying in the wind and casting a distinct shadow on the land. "It was just like the movies," he says. "At that moment, I knew I was destined to live somewhere tropical." That day Johnny dreamed of a life in paradise and, thanks to his drive to succeed, he wakes up in it every day.