Curse Amers Travels

THE CURSE OF THE 'GOOD' WEATHER

It seems wherever I go, warm weather seems to follow me, even when I am trying to escape it. Having lived in California most of my life, I sometimes get sick of having the same weather almost every day. I long for a place with 4 seasons, where the trees know to change color in the fall and it drops to freezing in winter.

We went to Germany in summer. When we were renting a car, we asked for one with air conditioning. They said 'you don't need air conditioning, it never gets hot'. Boy was it hot on the day we picked up the car. We had all the windows open and almost lost the directions -- the wind blew them away. Luckily they landed under the back seat.

We went to Italy. Again they said 'you don't need air conditioning, it never gets hot'. While we were there the headlines said 'record heat wave hits Italy'. They said it was the hotestest it had been in 20 years.

We went to England and drove to Scotland. They told us it rains a lot in Scotland. Luckily for us, they were wrong. It rained all 4 days we were in England, but it didn't rain at all in Scotland.

We brought all of our rain gear for a summer camping trip to Washington and Oregon. While we were in Washington, it was again 'record heat wave hits Washington'. It was so hot and humid we left North Cascades National Park early without hiking any trails and headed south for some extra time at Mount Saint Helens. All along the trip I had been saying that when we crossed the Oregon border back into northern California we could put away the rain gear that we hadn't needed. We decided to relax in Lassen National Park. The forecast was for scattered showers so on a whim, I put the rain fly over the tent and put a canopy over the table. I figured I might as well get some practice putting it up. I was the only one in the campground who did that. That night it started to rain. We heard people near us packing up and leaving. In the morning, it was still raining but we were very dry. I went and sat on my chair at the table under my canopy and watched as the remaining people packed up and left. Soon we were the only ones there. But the rain continued with no end in sight, so we ended up leaving too.

We decided to go to Yellowstone for Christmas and New Years. Seeing the large animals and the geysers in the snow is supposed to be one of the most beautiful sights anywhere, as the animals congregate near the geysers to keep warm and take advantage of the ice-free water. I have never felt a temperature below freezing so I was excited to go. As we drove through Utah, there was snow on the mountains but not on the roads. Idaho seemed to be having winter as we saw a lot of snow. Montana didn't have much snow. People told us it was an unusually warm winter, that even though it was the end of December. They said this was the weather they normally got in September and called it an 'Indian summer'. We had planned to take a tracked bus from where we were at the park headquarters in the northern part of the park to the geyser basin in the west part of the park. Unfortunately, because of a lack of snow, the tracked buses weren't running. Because the park's roads are closed in winter, we couldn't drive there either. The whole time we were there the temperature never went below the 20's. On the way back we stopped in Bryce Canyon in southern Utah. They seemed to have the snow that was missing in Yellowstone.

We went to Lake Tahoe over Thanksgiving. We decided to go as the forecast said there was a 0 % chance of rain/snow in Lake Arrowhead. The curse struck again. We arrived in the Lake Tahoe area on Saturday afternoon and learned that snowstorm hit Lake Arrowhead. Of course, it didn't hit us up in Lake Tahoe. We spent a relatively snow free week driving around Lake Tahoe, except when we ventured above 8000 feet where there was some 3 week old snow to play in. Lake Tahoe gets about 300 inches of snow a year, Lake Arrowhead is lucky if it gets 12. One day we went to Donner pass. It was snowing furiously as we went up there. After reaching the pass, we turned around and went back. The snow we had seen on the way was all melted by the time we got to it. We were staying in Reno as the hotels were cheap. We planned to leave Saturday to avoid the traffic. Friday night it started to rain. We were very surprised when we woke up to snow in Reno on Saturday morning as Reno is at only 4200 feet. We had planned to play in the snow in Lake Tahoe but as getting to there required going over a 7000 foot pass, we decided we would be better off driving home as we had to be home in 2 days and we weren't sure how far we could drive in the snow. We started driving at 11 am. It snowed the whole day. (I found out later that Reno got 18 inches that day).