It's Raining Rain

Welcome, sopping wet reader, as this week something amazing happened in the Bay Area: it rained! And this is amazing enough that it really does dominate all the news outlets. Here, our local free paper even found it amusing enough that their headline was an amusing spoof explaining to people what rain actually is:

It's actually not that rare to not see rain from March to October here, but last Winter was also exceptionally dry, meaning that most of California is in a severe drought. As a result, any rain is greeted exceptionally warmly here. We have a prediction of "storms" this weekend, which means prolonged rain, but let's see - the weather is almost always better here than the forecast.

Now we're British, in case you haven't noticed, and as a result we do love an umbrella. With the rain this week, we got a chance to use one:

It turns out it's perfectly fine to eat an ice cream cone under an umbrella here, it's just not something you get to do quite as often as in the UK.

We saw plenty of rain up in Oregon, which led me to joke that this sight was a permanent fixture in the Columbia River Gorge:

The thing that's interesting about the US is that compared to even mainland Europe, the geography is on a different scale. The chain of mountains known as the Cascades, 60-100-ish miles inland from the Pacific Ocean here on the West Coast, runs all the way from southern Canada, through Washington and Oregon, then down through California too. Those mountains form a 2000 mile long barrier, through which there's simply no low-lying route, except for the Columbia River Gorge. The geological processes involved in forming the mountains and the gorge itself are fascinating and have somewhat defined the area; in particular, the area we stayed, in the shadow of Mount Hood, has rich soil created from the ash of that particular volcano, and combined with its climate, makes it a big producer of tree fruit.

There's so much fruit there that you can even drive around the 'Fruit Loop', where you visit the farm shops of multiple local fruit producers to see what they've been growing... or in some cases, what junk they found in their attic and are trying to flog. Mostly the area grows pears and apples, but you can also sample Huckleberry (a bit like a blackcurrant) and Marionberry (seemingly some sort of hybridized blackberry) as local delicacies.

Now where there's apples, there's cider. Cider's a confusing word here: it can mean simply apple juice or sparkling apple juice, but with the optional prefix 'hard' it becomes something more like the alcoholic beverage that teenagers in the UK revere. So when in Rome...

I was piloting the truck, so I didn't partake, but the review I solicited from my colleague here described this particular cider as 'a bit lethal'. It looks a bit more like carrot juice here, but I can confirm it really was an alcoholic apple thing.

Anyway reader, let's leave it there. Hopefully, if we survive the oncoming storms forecast for tomorrow, we'll be back next week, but otherwise, send lifeboats, pedalos and armbands!