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How Travel Has Prepared Me for a Freak October Snow Storm

For those of you who have somehow managed to avoid all forms of media for the past several hours you should know that right now a majority of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast is being pounded by a freakish early snow storm.  By the time I got out of bed this morning–at 8:30–it was already coming down and a coating covered the ground.

Because I knew this storm was coming, I spent part of yesterday looking for campgrounds around the country and then driving around appreciating the fall foliage.  It was a picture-perfect autumn day, with no hint of the winter that was creeping up the coast.  While I sadly discovered that my real camera had a dead battery, I snapped one moderately-unsafe photo with my phone whilst driving.  This was yesterday…

Pretty, right?  I don’t remember a year that we’ve had such nice fall color–and I’m super bummed about the dead camera battery, as yesterday was clearly the last day to document said nice color.  Because this is today, taken not five minutes ago…

To be fair, I did manage to find some fall color still remaining–though I had to look pretty hard and shuffle through a good four inches of snow to find it.  Here it is, in all of its October 29th glory…

But this somehow doesn’t seem odd to me.  Why?  Because traveling has made my brain–and body–accept bizarre changes in weather.  More specifically, the increased frequency with which I’ve been traveling has made me very accustomed to seemingly out of season weather.  Take, for example, our summer road trip.  We went to Maine and Atlantic Canada.  So this is what a lot of my August looked like…

Though it didn’t rain like that the entire time, it was cold enough to require that I dress super cool, in my husband’s pants, a golf shirt, and all of this combined with the summer dress I stupidly packed…

A few weeks after returning from Canada, I went to Orlando.  It was September, and all of the trees were just starting to change here in Pennsylvania.  But in Orlando, it was 95 degrees with darn near 100% humidity.  This was my autumn…

And then I returned home to a rainy, rainy autumn in PA.  It seemed more like spring in the Pacific Northwest than autumn in Pennsylvania.  But of course, as soon as it seemed autumn had found herself and PA was aglow with golds and reds, off I went again, this time to Bermuda.  Because my computer organizes my photos by month, the photos of the fall leaves–and the snow–above are in the same folder as this photo…

…which I took of myself on a boat off the coast of Bermuda not ten days ago.  So as the snow falls on the trees that still sport autumn leaves whilst also falling on my nose–that is still peeling from my Bermuda sunburn–I am not confused in the least.  It all seems about right to me!