Redding, California is a nice place to live, especially if you like outdoor activities. It's no cultural
hotspot, but with the
Turtle Bay Exploration Park, two
symphony orchestras, and the restored art deco
Cascade Theater, it ain't exactly a cultural desert either.
I've enjoyed living here, but everyone choosing to live in the area pays the piper come summertime. It gets HOT. Many summer days aren't too bad--mid and high nineties--but we get perhaps 15 days per summer with temps reaching 105 or more. There
is something to that "dry heat" idea; I can attest as much from my years of working in south Louisiana, where the humidity can stick to you like pancake syrup. But hey, when it gets to 105 degrees or more, it's just
freakin' HOT, and that "dry heat" notion is scant comfort.
The heat here may very well be a blessing in disguise: I sometimes suspect we'd have a million people living here if not for those triple-digit days. Y'see, we have a couple of wonderful lakes here,
Shasta and Whiskeytown.
Mount Lassen National Park is but an hour away, as is the
Mount Shasta Ski Park. (For climbers, there's also the lure of
Mount Shasta itself.) You'll see fly fishermen casting along the
Sacramento River right in the
Redding city limits, and the nearby
Russian and
Trinity Alps Wildernesses beckon campers and backpackers.
If I'm sounding like a real estate agent casting about for out-of-the-area equity, stand by: no matter how much a person might feel drawn to this area's outdoor recreation opportunities, if he or she is a heat weenie, he or she ain't gonna make it.
We've already seen triple-digits, with the first day of summer still a week away. The average high for yesterday's date is 90 degrees, and the average low is 59 degrees. Yesterday, though, the temp reached 101 in
Redding, and as I write this at 1:30 a.m., it's still 84
degrees in town. (It's 74 in the foothills above town where we live. Living off of the valley floor has its benefits.)
According to the Weather Channel website, the forecast is for a high of 100 degrees again tomorrow. This year, the annual heat weenie exodus may commence early.
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