Today marks a very important milestone - it's the first time I wore my rain jacket on this trip. It's been over 40 days since I've utilized it and I think it was beginning to feel neglected. I think it's overuse at home has really worn it out (pun intended) and we needed to put some distance between us. It's been surprising how little it rains seemingly most places outside of PA.This is not to say I haven't seen rain before on this trip - I have. A couple times it rained while we were in the car (which only did so much to was the dead bugs off the windshield and front grill), and a few times while I was working in the hotel. There was that one time in Fargo where the storm came out of seemingly nowhere and we could barely see on the drive home. Or the time in Dickinson I thought I had to change hiking plans because of the impending afternoon rainstorm which never came. Each time, the rain cleared up before I went outside again. Except Fargo where my rain jacket was in the hotel room and not in the car.
I know when I first moved to PA almost 10 years ago, I was surprised by the precipitation and found somewhere that home has more days of precipitation than Seattle. It doesn't always rain all day, sometimes it's just for a couple of hours, enough to make everything seemingly continuously wet. But now, I'm surprised all over again. Do Pennsylvanians know that people can do stuff almost always without constantly checking the weather? Do they realize the daily joys of leaving their dry interiors and going into the world without carrying rain gear?
Because of living in PA, I have been conditioned to check the weather multiple times a day. I wanted to go to a free concert in the park tonight put on by the municipal band. It was supposed to rain right around the starting time of the concert. I was checking online throughout the day to see if they were going to cancel it with the rainstorm in the forecast. Surely, they will cancel an outdoor event when there will be rain, but I found nothing of the sort. I decided to make my way to the park, figuring I could always turn around if the concert did get canceled. It was about a 30 minute walk. The rain started 5 minutes into my walk and ended 5 minutes before I arrived. That was it. The show went on.
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