Hole In The Donut Travels

After a few housebound weeks in Illinois’ sub-freezing winter weather, a thirty-six degree day felt positively balmy. Although the weatherman called for yet another dreary, overcast day, no snow or freezing rain was forecast, so I seized the opportunity to visit the Morton Arboretum, a 1,700-acre park in the Chicago’s western suburbs.
The Arboretum was established [...]

I am on my annual pilgrimage to the Chicago area to visit family over the holidays. The day after I arrived, freezing rain coated everything with ice, creating dangerously slick driving conditions. The following day, more freezing rain was followed by eight inches of snow. Since then, it has snowed almost every day and the [...]

The Kankakee River ice jam is no more. Two days ago the temperature in Illinois soared to a record breaking 60 degrees; this on the heels of weeks of sub-zero temperatures that had frozen the river solid. As  the thermometer climbed, the ice began to melt and crack, piling up in giant slabs that backed [...]

Unless this crazy weather pattern stops, I’m afraid my family is going to run me out of town on a rail for fear that I am a jinx. To begin with, this has been Illinois’ coldest December in many years. The Kankakee River, which runs right by my Dad’s front door, NEVER freezes before January. [...]

The high temperature today in Illinois was MINUS one degree. This followed a night of sub-zero temps with wind gusts up to 35 mph. All night long, high winds roared across the frozen river outside my father’s house, tearing ice off the trees in the yard. Every so often the sound of ice shards spattering [...]

There is beauty in everything and last night’s ice storm was no exception. I braved the cold temperatures, slippery roads, and tree limbs crashing down all around me to capture these photos:

Snow on the Outer Banks of North Carolina? Not a regular occurrence, but it’s been known to happen.
Three inches of snow in one day in Las Vegas, where they normally don’t get more than a half inch during an entire winter? Now that’s a bit strange.
But when I heard it snowed in Malibu yesterday – [...]

I must have been able to stand cold weather at some point in my life, because I have memories of shoveling snow as a child in Chicago and of digging out cars stuck in snowdrifts during the winters of 1978 and ‘79. Perhaps it was all the years of living in Phoenix and the Caribbean [...]