Trevor,
cricketfan wrote:Looks like a terrific place to visit, Gary.
I was reading that SoCal was particularly wet this year. Did it inconvenience you a lot in the photography dept?
How did you keep that Nikon glass dry?
It was quite wet, and that caused some issues. Sunsets were difficult to photograph; the colours simply didn't materialise. Travelling was slightly hampered for me - more on that in a moment - but keeping stuff drya didn't present a major issue.
The weather was ... well, suffice to say there was lots of weather right through the whole of California over the last two weeks.
On my first day I spoke with a friend who lives in Half Moon Bay. That's just a little south of San Francisco. When I called her she was in the process of rescuing a severely soaked rug from her garage.
Lake Tahoe recieved over seven feet of snow in the day or two prior to New Year's Eve - I'm sure Andy in Sacremento would have felt a fair bit pain from that storm - and for much of last week, I5, the major highway that runs a north-south line through the centre of California, and connects Los Angeles with Sacremento (the state capital) was closed through The Grapevine due to snow. It finally reopened on Friday last.
On the same day I spoke with another friend in Dallas who told me it snowed in Dallas the day prior to Christmas. Dallas normally gets a few days of snow each year - 2 - 4 would be typical. I made the comment to Jon that he finally got a white Christmas in Dallas (before Dallas he'd lived in Florida) and his observation was that by the next day the snbow had turned to a dirty grey slush.
In the meantime, friend on the east coast - Raleigh-Durham, for instance -were telling me that they were seeing fine weather and temperatures of around 67F on NYE.