Oregon Rain

There are many web forums dedicated to helping people move around, from country to country or within the US, with information and discussion on various topics. We found these very useful for Visa information, but I've mostly given up reading them now as they're full of tales of woe, or moaning about various aspects of life in the place being moved from or moved to. One thing that always gets a lot of flak is the weather in the Northwest.

It rains in Oregon, OK? Oddly enough it rains pretty much everywhere, and where it doesn't people wish it did. Somehow though, Oregon and Washington seem to come in for more complaining than other states, or maybe I'm just noticing it more.

The mean annual rainfall in Eugene is much the same as it was back in London, ditto the temperature. In Eugene though, we get wetter Winters and dryer Summers. It's rained a lot in the last few weeks but no more than I would expect in London, and to me at least, it's been less inconvenient. Much of the rain falls at night, all of it falls outdoors, and we've had several dry, warm and sunny days even in December and January. We keep tabs on the weather in London, and this Winter there's been an unusually heavy fall of snow across the UK, which is pretty for a couple of days and then a nuisance until it's all melted and the flood waters have receded.

We also get more daylight hours here than in London, being seven degrees further South, and I did find Winter in London a particularly dismal affair, sometimes not needing to draw the curtains for days on end as it was so dark, and when outside, schlocking about with head down against the rain, coat drawn up around the ears against the cold, and feet constantly cold and damp from the rain, splashes and puddles.

Masybe I'm painting a slightly worse picture of London than it really is, but I'm certainly not missing the weather there, or disliking the weather here.