Disappointing Down South

There’s a seven-letter reason people enjoy living in Los Angeles so much… weather.  For most of the year, it’s hard to beat LA’s consistently mild and clement weather.  Fall and winter are easily handled, unless you come unprepared.  I met one such person at LAX before my return flight, yesterday.  She was a Kentucky horsewoman who’d come out west for the Breeder’s Cup held at Santa Anita Race Track.  She’d visited the year previously and recalled how balmy it had been.  This year, however, she shivered through several days of racing, and was looking forward to flying back to a warmer Kentucky.  I had flown south from Sacramento to enjoy UCLA defeat Washington at the Rose Bowl.  In previous years, watching college football in Pasadena meant wearing a t-shirt and sun screen.  Not so this weekend.  A chill settled across the greater Los Angeles basin, giving Southern California a bit of autumnal bite to its air, particularly at night.  Too bad there wasn’t much fall color to go with the crisp, sweater-weather temps.

0-15% — Los Angeles.  The fall color in the City of Los Angeles – what there is of it – is disappointing right now.  Just about all the trees to be seen in greater Los Angeles were planted, and those exotic species were showing very little color change, if any.  Some near the coast are showing dark red emerging from darker green.  And as reported previously, while the fall color in Chico was literally luminescent, in LA, it was lackluster.