Feel like knocking California today?
Triple digit heat gets some people in the mood to do so.
There is a cure for such a mindset.
It’s called “The Midwest.”
To be clear, I am not putting down the Midwest, per se.
I know more than a few folks who live in the region.
And it has a lot to offer, although not on the scale and variety of California.
Someone in the Midwest might disagree with California being better in any category but they’d have a hard time arguing that point when it comes to summer weather.
If you are born into a Mediterranean climate zone like California and you live here very long, spending a hot July day in places like Champaign in Downstate Illinois is an eye opener.
You can’t really appreciate the Central Valley summer heat with its frequent excursions into the 100-degree plus territory along with average humidity in the 40 percent range until you take the plunge into the world of “showering” with your clothes on.
Years ago, I left Sacramento on a flight to Champaign in mid-July.
It was 103 degrees when I boarded wearing OP walking shorts and a polo shirt.
I barely got a drop of sweat on me walking from the long-term parking lot to the terminal.
It was a different story landing at 8 p.m. in Champaign.
At the time, you departed the plane and walked a short distance across the tarmac to the terminal.
It was just a tad below 90 degrees.
The same went for the humidity.
I was soaking wet from the time I stepped outside the jet onto the portable stairs until I reached the air conditioned terminal.
“It’s just the humidity,” I was told as I expressed embarrassment to friends who had come to pick me up.
The next morning, we followed what was routine for all of us; a morning jog.
It started out nice and cool.
After a block or so, Jack & Gail urged me to pick up my pace as I shouldn’t hang back with them, adding that I needed to do so to work out the jet lag.
Like a lamb to the slaughter, I followed their “advice”.
They caught up with me a couple of minutes later, where I had stopped doubled over with pain in my side.
“It’s the humidity,” Jack semi-chuckled.
I’d been had.
But the world wasn’t through driving home the point I should appreciate California weather.
I had reserved a rental for a week as we wanted to go for a multiple day road trip. At the time, they had a subcompact that was prone to issues.
Champaign had some major event going in at the university and nearby military installation.
Why that is an important detail, when I went to pick up the rental they had only one left but the air conditioning didn’t work.
They checked around town at other rental firms and none was available.
I was given the option of renting the car still but with a discount for the non-working air conditioning.
Let’s just say I paid for what we got — 600 plus miles of misery.
You haven’t lived until you’ve driven to St. Louis with all four windows down in a Ford LTD with an ice chest filled with bottled water and soft drinks that you went through faster than the V8 engine depleted a tank of fuel.
The most memorable experience in the St. Louis area wasn’t going to the top of the Gateway Arch or exploring the Union Station that is a cross between Pier 39, an amusement park, and an aquarium.
It was a trip outside of St. Louis to the Meramec Caverns.
To be honest, it was not as impressive as some of the caverns you can find in the 209 as it was fairly pedestrian as caverns go.
But it was an incredible 58 constant degrees.
Feeling better, Gail suggested instead of heading back to St. Louis where we had checked earlier and found there were ample hotel rooms available, we headed toward Hannibal.
Gail knew full well my affection for Samuel Clemens and his literary works.
How big was it at the time?
The next day at Becky’s Book Shop I ended up dropping almost $300 on books and collections of letters by Mark Twain that I did not already possess.
This was back in 1989 when $300 was basically half a month’s rent for an apartment.
The owner asked if I was a teacher or professor as she had never had anyone spend that much in her store.
But the real kicker of my trip to Hannibal was the motel.
We didn’t arrive in Hannibal the night before until shortly before midnight.
There wasn’t a single room left due to a convention in town.
The desk clerk at the Best Western called around and directed us to East Hannibal across the Mississippi River where there was a room available.
We arrived under cloak of darkness after crossing a rickety old bridge.
From the outside, it made the Bates Hotel look like the Hyatt Regency.
The room had two double beds and an air conditioner that made noise and little else.
The mattresses, when you sat on them, literally sunk halfway to the floor.
It was miserable but I was so tired from driving 10 hours, I passed out immediately.
When I woke up the next morning, Jack and Gail were sitting on the edge of their bed, dressed, and ready to go.
I told them I needed to take a shower because I felt like crap.
They just smiled and said they were going for a walk.
Long story short, the shower was barely a drip.
I literally took a shower refilling a Dixie Cup from the bathroom sink over and over again.
You can imagine my surprise when we checked out to find there was a swimming pool on the property.
An hour later, we were on a replica steamboat on the Mississippi River where I was dripping profusely on the second deck in the shade.
I said to Jack and Gail “how can anyone live in this and ever get use to it?”
A man sitting nearby on a bench with his wife, piped up, “you never do.”
In the course of an ensuing conversation, I found out they had moved to New Orleans six years prior from San Diego.
The Central Valley this time of year has a reasonable average humidity of 40 percent.
Downstate Illinois, by comparison, is more than double that in July.
The grass might indeed be greener in the Midwest, Texas or the South in general, but it’s only because of all the humidity