How 'Bout This Weather?Last week, my sister called me from the Texas Panhandle, where temperatures had climbed to a bone-dry 100+ degrees, with the region’s famously violent winds creating an effect akin to, as she put it, “a blast furnace.” Sounds terrible, right? Not to me. I sighed wistfully, missing that dry heat that defined the summers of my childhood, remembering those first gusts of hot wind that heralded the season’s arrival, recalling sizzling sidewalks under my bare feet so vividly that I unconsciously rose to my tip-toes to walk across my New York City apartment for a glass of water. Those were truly the summer sidewalks of lore, on which one could quite easily fry an egg. Here in the city, where even 80 degrees feels unbearable when delivered on a platter of New York’s special recipe for mugginess, you’d have more of a poached egg, or perhaps a runny scramble of yolks and cigarette butts and dirt. No disrespect to the city I choose to call home now, but I’ll take a dry 100 degrees over a sticky, filmy 80 degrees any day (and today, it’s a sticky, filmy 90 degrees at 11:30am). In fact, because of this, summer is the only time of year when I consistently miss my hometown.
Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member Jose Kevo
In the midst of my nostalgic episode, I realized that weather—the quintessence of boring small talk—gets a bum rap. It’s one of the driving forces behind the tourism calendar (there’s a reason the Caribbean’s high season falls smack in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter); it’s the one completely uncontrollable condition that affects millions of travelers each year; it’s the reason certain types of travel exist (ski trips, cruises, fall foliage tours); and it’s a universally powerful element in the formula that makes up a person’s favorite—and least-favorite—destinations. I adore Santa Fe and its surrounding Sangre de Cristo mountains not in small part because I think it boasts the best weather in the world: snowy, dramatic winters; beautiful autumns; and summers that bring dry heat, afternoon thunderstorms, and evenings with a refreshing chill in the air. Conversely, no matter how much I love Paris and Prague, you couldn’t pay me to spend a summer vacation in either city, obsessing more about melting into the ground mid-stride than about the gorgeous architecture and fantastic food.
Often, weather is even a point of local pride, though I’ve encountered this more in the United States than anywhere else. (The single most-often claimed saying has got to be, “If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes!” I’ve heard this claimed as a “local” witticism in at least 10 different places in the US, and I’m betting I’m not the only one.) Pacific-Northwesterners are eager to show off their region in the summer, when months of that infamous cold drizzle are rewarded with lush, colorful nature tableaux. Alaskans win the kind of respect no one else can claim with their bracing temperatures and wildly varying rations of sunlight (21 hours a day in summer, 3 in winter). And while the Deep South boasts boiling humidity in the summer (which I’ve personally experienced and haven’t entirely succeeded in blocking out of my memory), I think the award goes to city-dwellers without cars in places like Chicago and New York, for withstanding their equally ferocious heat and humidity without the luxury of uninterrupted air-conditioning.
So let’s talk about the weather. What’s your favorite weather locale, and what places will you absolutely avoid in certain seasons because of the weather? Extreme-weather travel experiences are also fair game. I’ll continue to sweat it out here in the concrete jungle while I wait for your comments; word has it I’ll only have to wait 5 minutes for the weather to change.
Back to MainComment Preview
Recent Posts
- Travel Deals Peak In Time for Black Friday
- Thanksgiving Task Force Wrap-Up
Abe & New Buddy Bid Farewell from DCA
November Winning Streak Continues for Obama Household - DCA Travelers Pick Michelle Obama To Cook Thanksgiving Dinner- Smooth Travels Overall at LAX
- Saying So Long From LAS!
- All is Smooth in the Mile-High City
Signing Off From PHX- Good Lessons To Be Learned at LAS
- PDA in Abundance at LAX
Comments
The one travel experience I've had that would stop me from revisiting a location in the same season was going to China in summer; exploring Shanghai and Beijing in July brought new meaning to the word "stifling."
I started to think about my favorite climates and am coming up blank. Maybe I have to face the fact that I'm one of those people always complaining about the weather!
Today I wasted too much time looking at real estate prices in New Mexico because OH MY GOD we are having the coldest June on record here in Seattle. Typically, we don't really expect summer until after the 4th of July, but we do expect some sort of spring, after which our region turns in to what can only be called Paradise, I kid you not.
But this year, as the forecast calls for snow at 2500 feet on the 9th of June, we are thinking that our Paradise moment has passed and a vacation to the tropics in June, during the low season, might not be such a bad idea after all.
Now, I must go round up the stray stuff that the wind has hurled about the yard as the next front, supposedly bearing hail, blasts in upon us. Sigh.