We moved to Seattle in February. I knew it was going to be a tough transition moving from Arizona’s best time of year to Seattle’s worst time of year, but our first month wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t sure if we didn’t think it was too bad because we only had a month of consistent bad weather, then spring came and we got glimpses of how awesome Seattle weather can be. Or I wasn’t sure if the bad weather just wouldn’t phase us. People would ask us if we liked Seattle, when we would tell them we loved it, they would always say, “Wait for winter.” So I was really curious to see if we would still love Seattle after our first real winter.
It was almost like Seattle knew that it was these Arizonans first real winter because it was a doozy! This winter beat all sorts of records. Record cold, record rain (amount and duration), and record snow. I think it is safe to say we are fully initiated into the weather of the Pacific Northwest! And the verdict is we still LOVE Seattle! I’d take a few months or cloudy weather, than the awful heat of Arizona!
The winters here are cloudy, rainy, wet, and chilly. An Arizona winter has a fairly high high during the day, but the lows get pretty low at night. In Seattle there is only about a 5-10 degree difference during the day and the night. So in Arizona the high could be in the 60s or the 70s, but the low would be in the high 30s to the mid 40s. In Seattle the day high would be low to mid 40s and the lows would be high 30s to mid 40s. We still would see days that might reach 50 degrees if it was a super nice day, opposed to a warm winter day in Arizona being about 80 degrees. So yes the winter was a bit more chilly than in Arizona, but it wasn’t awful!
The winters in Arizona are dry and sunny. The wet season in Seattle is during the winter so we definitely saw rain! There were a few days that Chris would wear a rain jacket to work, but we still don’t own an umbrella, so the rain doesn’t come down hard (at least not that often.) Gray skies are very common here in Seattle, but honestly, I saw the sun more than I thought we would. Sometimes we would only get a peak of it, but I don’t think we ever went more than a week without seeing the sun. (Chris jokes that he saw the sun more here in the winter than he ever did in Arizona since his building here is all windows, and he had no windows in his building in Arizona.) Towards the end we were getting ready for it to warm up a hair so we could go play and do whatever we wanted on the weekends! The worst of it was when we had two really bad weekends back to back, but that even happened less than I thought it would!
This winter was also very unique because it snowed here…a lot! I think we had three different snowy days and the kids loved it! From what people were saying it doesn’t snow like this often! People told us that it snows about once a year in Seattle, but it hardly ever sticks. From some articles I read they said that it hadn’t snowed like it did this year since 2008. I’m not a fan of snow. I don’t drive in it, I don’t like the hassle of it. So I did not want to move where there was snow, so Seattle was appealing to us for that reason. The snow days we had here weren’t awful. I didn’t go anywhere when it snowed, but the snowed stayed on the ground for only a day, so it wasn’t bad! The kids didn’t go to school when it snowed and we just played in it all day. It was a blast!
We made a giant snowman (the biggest one our street.) that stayed around forever (about two months)! We live on a huge hill so we walked down the street and the kids were able to sled down the street. We joked that we didn’t realize how many kids lived close to us until that day. I swear every kid in the neighborhood was sledding down the street! It was a lot of fun to watch, even if it stressed me out big time!
I think we had a total of three snow days this winter and the kids loved every one of them! (I loved the first one, then they got old!) The days (or weekends) when it was too chilly or rainy to go out and play we found other ways to play. Mostly we spent a lot of time at the rock climbing gym where both kids have grown so much in their climbing! We also still found a lot of time to go out and play outside even if was a bit chilly! I’m so happy to report that I prefer the Seattle winters to Arizona summers, and we still love Seattle!
The McBrides 