Californians Experiencing Winter Weather Like, Well, Everyone Else
Rain.
Rain that just won’t go away and keeps coming back here.
Snow-stopping streets. Hail – during a nationally-televised PGA Tour golf tournament at a location known for its seaside beauty. Winds so strong it moved piles of sand off beaches and into walkways as deep as snowfall in the mountains. Cold temperatures getting into the 30s in the southern part of the state.
The damaging of a state icon, the Lone Cypress tree.
California has been walloped by nature so far this winter, to the point that us residents are asking two things: 1.) What in the world is going on here and, 2.) when will it end and get warm and sunny again?
The fact of the matter is that us Californians are pretty much going through what everyone else in the world does in winter: have bad weather.
Of course, we’re not used it so we’re getting anxious for things to return to normal.
Oh, we get rain in January and February. And heavy winds, strong enough to knock over tractor trailers and, as was the case one year, ocean waves to slam over a jetty in Redondo Beach with such ferocity that officials closed the King Harbor Yacht Club and sent all of us who had gathered to watch the show home because the waves were crashing over the facility.
But we’ve had nothing like this winter: constant days of rain and, after a brief break, more constant days of rain. Weather so cold I feel I’m writing this while sitting inside a refrigerator. It hailed during the Pebble Beach golf tournament and ripped a limb off Monterey County’s iconic symbol, the Lone Cypress tree.
As a result of the rain, there’s been a lot of flooding and as I wrote this blog post, a 3.1-magnitude earthquake hit a small town just north of San Francisco.
How does all this affect you as a traveler? Some roads could be closed due to damage or even snowfall (such as I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Interstate 5 just north of Los Angeles in a place called “the Grapevine.”
It is also important to do something in advance that never before I have ever recommended for people visiting California: you had better check the weather before you leave home.
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