40 degrees

As I alluded to yesterday in my latest edition of ‘I would SOOOO be a crazy cat person if I never got married’, my wife and kids are out of town. They are spending a few days on the Oregon coast with my step-mom and her two girls, before heading north, where I will meet them this weekend for my brother’s wedding.

While on the coast, they will do some outlet mall shopping, visit the Tillamook Cheese Factory, and maybe walk in the sand…but precious little swimming. The high temperature today in Lincoln City was predicted to be a balmy 63 degrees. That is 40 degrees colder than our expected day time high in Richland today, and 8 degrees cooler than our overnight LOW was last night.

I’m slightly jealous.

It’s amazing what a mountain range and geography can do for a climate. As the crow flies, my wife is less than 250 miles(a good 6 hour drive) from where I am, but you get across the Cascades and it’s a different world.

Distances are different out west than in the east. Despite being born in New England, I spent most of my formative years in Washington, so I didn’t always notice it. My wife though, as a born and raised Connecticut girl, noticed right away after moving here. We used to have to drive about 120 miles to visit my parents, which was just to get down and around Puget Sound. A similar drive in New England would have taken you from Groton, through Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and almost to the Maine border.

It’s one of the things I love about Washington. While I was very enamored of the area between Coeur D’Alene and Missoula, it still doesn’t give you as much overall variety as living in Washington. The ONLY thing that makes living in the Tri-cities tolerable to me is that it is only an hour and a half east or west to find myself in the tree line of either the Cascades or the Blues. With a 3 hour drive, I can make it up to the 5000 foot level on Mount Rainier, and play in the snow…even in August.

For now, since I need to work tomorrow, I’ll just have to settle for my environment destroying A/C unit.