It's a dry heat

Four of the words I used to roll my eyes at: It’s a dry heat.

In my book, they were akin to “New and Improved,” three words which, when boldly printed across a familiar package, are an instant red flag. That product is hardly new, and most certainly not improved. In fact, it is likely to be inferior to and less effective, yet more expensive, than the old version.

“It’s a dry heat” holds out a promise similar to “new and improved.” Yes, it’s hot, the words imply, but you will not drown in your own sweat here, the way you might in Georgia, or Florida.

I don’t like sweating. I sweated my way through my childhood in Western New York, my young adulthood in Virginia and Maryland, and I sure as heck sweated plenty in the green corn-scented summer vapors of Central Nebraska, the first twelve years of my wedded bliss.

I know sweat.

I would exercise more if I didn’t sweat doing it. Warm water, squeezed out of my own pores, trickling down my temples, my back – ugh. I cannot comprehend the allure of saunas; I marvel at people who eagerly carry their own special sauna towels and slippers into the gym or the spa, or – egads! – who intentionally construct these cramped, hot sweatboxes in their homes. Volunteer sweating? Even worse, in a seated, relaxed position? Why?

To me, sweat and heat go together. I sweated plenty in those “Christmas Story” -style snowsuits when I was kid playing outside during the winter, but I didn’t know I was sweating until I got into the warm house. Sweat came automatically during the humid Western New York summers, no exertion required.

After my parents moved to California, my mother used to try to lure me out to the Central Valley, with those words. “It’s hot, but it’s a dry heat.”

Yeah, that’s what makes ovens so effective. “Dry heat” is still bloody hot.

I actually enjoy rain and wind and snow, most of which are negligible in or entirely absent from the Valley. Fortunately, so is high humidity. Back in Nebraska, you really become aware of humidity when it hits 65 percent and higher. Around here, people start complaining when – and if – it hits 45 percent. It just doesn’t happen very often; people are not accustomed to sweating with their heat.

And heat they have plenty of. Here in the Valley, heat warnings don’t go out until daytime temps routinely top 105, and nights don’t drop below seventy. Here, in summer, you’ll get hotter water out of your cold water tap than your hot water heater. Hummingbirds appreciate bubbling hot nectar as a refreshing, cool drink.

I recall one long, long drive with my grandmother in my brother’s car from the San Francisco Bay area to Mom’s house in Visalia. The catch? No air conditioning in the car. The temperate climes of the coast dropped farther and farther behind us while ahead of us the Central Valley landscape shimmered in waves of heat. Grandma withered into her seat as the temperature climbed into the mid-nineties, the high nineties, then topped out at 106. We stopped at a convenience store for drinks. Grandma insisted she was fine and didn’t want anything. I bought her a can of Orangina anyway. Grandma never drank it; she pressed the cold can to her forehead.

For years, then – decades, even – I gave every excuse I could think of for why I could not visit my parents and the rest of my family who had migrated to California. They all knew the real reason: it’s hot. Dry or not, it’s hot.

So it wasn’t the dry heat that finally lured me and Ron out here last year. It was family. But with a pool for backup to our air conditioning unit, I was chugging along just fine in this dry heat. Until recently when, in the middle of a genuine Valley heat wave, our 20-year-old air conditioner went kaput.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, before we topped out around 108 outside, I noticed that the air conditioner had yet failed to achieve our cooling temperature; it was about two degrees warmer inside than the thermostat was set for. By five p.m., it was five degrees warmer. We knew we had a problem.

Needless to say, summer is the busy season for air conditioning specialists, and we feared a long, hot delay in getting the AC fixed. We had the great good fortune, however, to get someone in almost immediately, and within two days, our old unit was out, a new one was installed, and we were cooling again. Hats off to Weathertech of Visalia for their speedy response, fine work and reasonable price. Thanks, Vincent and son!

In the meantime, much to my surprise . . . I discovered there’s something to those four words:

“It’s a dry heat.”

Had the air conditioner failed on the farm back in Nebraska in the middle of August, my eyeballs would be sweating as I looked at the thermostat. After 30 minutes, I would be complaining about how unbearably hot it was, how uncomfortable I was.

Here in the sweat-free, semi-desert of California’s Central Valley, I remained pretty comfortable for a day and a half. The house grew warmer and warmer, yes, but with no humidity to speak of, it barely registered on my sweat misery index. I checked the thermometer upstairs just to marvel at how little I cared about how hot it was getting. In fact, within a few minutes of paddling into the pool, I was shivering in its 86-degree ice bath.

Could I possibly have acclimated to this dry heat? This winter, as daytime high temperatures plummet to about sixty, will I be shivering and complaining about the cold? Will I actually feel forced to wear socks with my sandals?

Recently, Ron and I spoke with a former Valley resident who now lives in coastal Los Angeles. When he was invited to linger a few hours longer in the Valley for a nice visit, he quickly declined, citing his inability any longer to bear the oppressive heat.

Dude, get over it.

It’s a dry heat.

Waiting for the rain

                                          Singin' in the rain.

Bread, milk, toilet paper.

BMT – that’s how two "shock jock" deejays in Washington, D.C. summed up the panicked rush that paralyzed the metro area at the first mention of a winter storm. Never mind that most "storms" coming through the area barely produced four inches of wet snow which, within a few hours, would melt and swirl down the storm sewers; most of the population of five million besieged every grocery, hardware and convenience store to wipe them out of snow shovels, ice melt, beer, potato chips and, of course, the BMT staples. One car dealer even reported a spike in sales of four-wheel-drive vehicles in the couple of days prior to storms.

For this native of blizzard-prone Western New York, snow in the D.C. region barely registered. Historically, however, the area averages nearly 40 inches of precipitation annually, yet during the last couple of years I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the region was visibly wilting under a prolonged drought.

I fretted, waiting for the rain. I lived in a place where generous rains had pushed green jungle over Civil War battlefields, where flowers bloomed through three seasons of rain. I worried about the implications of no rain in a place where it was supposed to rain.

Then I met Ron, who promised me that there would be plenty of snow in Nebraska, and rain would bless the spring and early summer. He told me stories about ferocious Great Plains blizzards, followed by flooding along the Big Blue River, the creek that ran through the Burke homestead. I looked forward to living again in a place where it was supposed to rain.

We did have some scary snow storms, and our little creek spread a quarter mile wide in springtime a couple of times, but within a few years of moving to Nebraska, drought there dried up the Big Blue, driving away the herons and the beavers. We had seen flocks of migrating geese, hundreds of thousands at a time, but now they diverted their route to find and follow running water. High drifts sculpted by icy winds belied how little snow was falling on the farm. The legendary, bone-chilling cold of the Great Plains disappeared. Throughout most of the winter months, I was comfortable leaving the house warmed only by a heavy sweatshirt and sneakers.

I was still waiting for the rain, but the effects of global climate change were becoming more pronounced across the nation. And, as the climate scientists had predicted, the weather became more unpredictable. By the time serial blizzards struck the Great Plains during the winter of 2009-10, I was shouting, "Let it snow!"

Heat and drought returned to the nation’s heartland this summer, but I am no longer there to worry about it. I moved, instead, to a place where heat is the norm and rain is almost mythical. I don’t have to worry about the lack of rain in the Central Valley of California; it’s not supposed to rain here.

Whatever your impressions or feelings about Nebraska, it is kryptonite to one class of persons: weather geeks. Aspiring meteorologists flock to the state, only to be confronted by the reality that TV weather guys already there never move on or retire. Even as global climate change accelerates, Nebraska is every weather geek’s dream: tornados, blizzards, hail, sub-zero temperatures and heat indices soaring beyond 100 F – real weather guys live for this stuff.

By contrast, I think people who come to the Valley to forecast the weather have different dreams, the kind that don’t require so much time on the job. The biggest weather challenge around here is finding new ways to say, "Sunny and hot." There is absolutely no reason to wait up for the late local weather news. There is no weather "news," just more of the same.

The average annual precipitation in Visalia is eleven inches, and none of that is snow. People here are taken by surprise when it rains. Excited texts and phone calls fly back and forth across the city: Is it raining at your house?

So I am struck by an apparent anomaly I regularly see here: Umbrellas.

Umbrellas, everywhere. More umbrellas in use, every day, than I ever saw in Nebraska’s slushy snows or Virginia’s downpours.

Umbrellas shading outdoor cafes. Umbrellas as mobile shade for pedestrians. Umbrellas here are seldom employed in their traditional use. Though marketed as "umbrellas," they would more properly be called "parasols." Their primary use here is to create shade in a place where shade is a precious commodity.

Absolutely my favorite use of umbrellas around Visalia is to shade flowers. Yes, flowers. The first time I saw umbrellas propped in a beautifully landscaped yard, I thought they must have been abandoned there by kids as toys. Then I realized that, day after day, they were never removed. And they were generally oriented toward the west, in a location where the afternoon sun would burn fiercely. And underneath each nestled pretty blossoms.

Nobody here worries that their plants will not get enough sun. The bigger concern is that their elaborate landscaping will fry under relentless sun and heat. And underneath these flower canopies, irrigation systems hydrate and nourish each plant on a carefully regulated schedule.

Around here, there is no use waiting for the rain.

I'll have a mimosa, please



The Pink Bunkadoo. OK, there is no such tree, except in one of my favorite movies, "Time Bandits." Produced in 1981 by, and starring a bunch of, the guys from Monty Python, the movie explores time and God, good and evil, history and modern society as only the Monty Python guys can. A gang of little people roam time with a map of the universe they stole from the Supreme Being after being kicked out of heaven for having created the Pink Bunkadoo, "600 feet high, bright red and smelled terrible." I cannot help but think of mimosa trees, adorned with their fluffy pink flowers, as the Pink Bunkadoo. They usher spring into summer with graceful beauty.

Creature of habit

                                          Picky eater.

So what makes a Californian a Californian?

Having been born in the state? A true native? Nah. I’ve met people from foreign countries living here now who are more Californian than my native-born nieces.

Knowing what "tri-tip" is? It helps.

Stuffing tiny dogs into designer bags and carrying them everywhere? This affectation did not originate with Britney Spears and other recent Hollywood starlets eager for a photo op, but Mississippian Spears forsakes her native state for California every time she tucks the little woofers in.

It’s a big state, encompassing many climates and cultural zones, so the California identity is very broad. I’m still working out my own list of qualifications, but here’s how it starts:

1. Being able to attract hummingbirds to your feeders.

Gotta tell you, folks, if you can’t get hummingbirds to hover at your sugar water feeders in this state, there is something seriously wrong with you. They are everywhere, nesting in garages, dogfighting above houses, and sip-sip-sipping at thousands, quite possibly millions, of feeders through most of California.

Back in Nebraska, I couldn’t get a hummingbird to drop a bomb on my back porch. Innumerable sparrows ate of the seed I put out. Blue jays, cardinals, grosbeaks, doves, nuthatches, finches – goldfinches clung to my niger seed feeders by the tens of dozens. Baltimore orioles licked clean the little pots of grape jelly I put out for them. The list of birds that regularly partook at my table topped 50 species, and not a hummingbird among them.

I tried putting out hummingbird feeders, but in the twelve years I lived there, I spotted a grand total of one hummingbird, this little guy hovering above my dog’s water bowl. I was mentally plotting a whole garden filled with red flowers, but within three minutes it zipped away and was gone. End of hummingbird visits.

Other bird lovers around Nebraska attract hummers to their feeders, but we were a little too far west, I think, and out of the birds’ regular habitat.

Here in California, I have chosen to give up seed feeding. I don’t want to attract other vermin to a neighborhood more crowded than my old one by a factor of about 50. When I heard goldfinches chattering during the winter, I couldn’t resist putting out a niger feeder, but they ignored it. My sister Chris, who lures whole tribes of them to her feeders, suggested that they already have regular feeding stations in other yards and simply didn’t need mine. I’m OK with that.

But hummingbirds – a no-brainer in this state. Water to sugar at a ratio of 4:1, fake flower feeding ports on a plastic or glass bottle, and voila! hummingbird heaven. Chris can’t keep her feeders filled; she’s cooking up nectar every day for dozens of the tiny speedsters.

When Ron and I arrived at our new home late last summer, a plastic feeder hanging off the pergola outside the kitchen was already hosting several hummingbirds. They buzzed out of the Meyer lemon tree, whirred above the pool, and loop-de-looped back to the feeder my mother had hung there as a housewarming gift.

For several months, I refilled it regularly, and our little guys grew fat and happy. Then one day I left it alongside the sink for cleaning. The next time I saw it, it was a warped bubble of melted plastic emerging from the dishwasher.

You can break an ankle tripping over all the hummingbird feeders for sale around here. I bought a glass one, anticipating another top-rack ride through the dishwasher. I liked the whimsical design of colored circles in the clear glass, and the brightly colored flower feeding ports in the copper base.

The hummingbirds didn’t. They wouldn’t touch the thing. After several weeks of waiting for them to "adapt," I took it down and hung up a substitute, another glass one of much plainer design, with the standard red plastic base.

The next morning, a large ring of sugar water stained the concrete below the feeder. No matter how I fiddled with it, the leak persisted.

I selected the third feeder with more attention to the feeding ports. Her hummers seemed to like having a perch, Mom said. The original she had hung in our yard had perches, I recalled. I bought a near-duplicate, filled it and presented it to the hummingbirds.

Again, rejection. I played with the nectar recipe, enriching it with more sugar. No takers.

What was I doing wrong? Perches, water-to-sugar ratio, plastic vs. copper vs. glass?

By now, several more months had passed. It takes a while to be certain that hummingbirds are snubbing you. I was grocery shopping with Mom one day when she said, "I think these hummingbird feeders are just like the one I put up for you."

I immediately put one in my shopping cart. I took it home, cooked up my 4:1 ratio, and hung it out. For several days I could hardly bear to look at it, hanging there unappreciated and forlorn.

And then...one bright spot of jewel green paused by a feeding port. One long, scimitar bill dipped into my sugary offering...dipped again, and again.

Now, several days later, the dogfights have resumed above the pool. Several hummingbirds are muscling each other for dominance of my lone feeder. I’m thinking of hanging out another one.

I know exactly what kind I’ll get.

Destination shopping

Grandpa Ed's clock takes pride of place atop our dining room IKEA storage. Great-Grandpa George Burke bought the clock around 1880, but Ron grew up with it tick-tocking on Grandpa Ed's mantel.

                       IKEA

(Sung to the tune of "Maria," from West Side Story)

IKEA...I just shopped a store called IKEA...

And that old shopping game

Can’t ever be the same

For me.

OK, I adore IKEA. I first discovered the Swedish Wonder Store when I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and shopped IKEA in nearby Woodbridge. Ron, 50% Swede himself, was skeptical that a giant furniture store could cook, but one bite of IKEA’s Swedish meatballs and he was a convert.

I had no beef with driving nearly 550 miles from the farm in Nebraska to a Chicago suburb when I needed cabinets to contain my scrapbooking sprawl. The IKEA in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a little closer, at 464 miles, but we have friends we like to visit in and around Chicago, making it the obvious choice.

I don’t know exactly what the store taps in me and gazillions of other IKEA idolizers around the globe. Perhaps it’s the promise of order imposed on a big, sloppy world by one humble Allen wrench. Maybe it’s their skill at making every shopper believe she is a design and organization genius. Could be the meatballs.

There are eight IKEA stores in California. Eight! Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida all come in a far-distant second, with three locations each. Illinois’ two locations are both in the Chicago area; the rest of Illinois can just lump it.

Eight IKEAs in California! I’m positively giddy. Yet from my new home base in Visalia, it’s still a pilgrimage of at least 179 miles, three hours’ driving time, to reach the nearest IKEA in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles. My next closest option is 216 miles straight up the Valley to West Sacramento. A store in Palo Alto is actually a few miles closer, but farther away due to traffic time.

So what gives? I smell bias here.

We moved here from near Stromsburg, with a population of some 1,200 people, the largest city in Polk County, Nebraska. One regional health department there serves four counties, Polk, York, Butler and Hamilton, with a total population that doesn’t quite hit 37,000 people. Maybe I can forgive IKEA for ignoring the prime commercial real estate along I-80 in York County, even for snubbing Stromsburg, the Swede Capital of Nebraska.

But here around Visalia, Tulare and Fresno Counties alone boast 1.4 million – million! – people. Throw in Kern County and the city of Bakersfield, and that population base jumps to 2.3 million.

Two-point-three million people aren’t enough to warrant an IKEA? Are you kidding me? Is it just because people around here have to drive by dairies and orange groves to reach their shopping destinations? Is it because 99 percent of the grapes grown around here end up in school lunches, not bottled behind witty wine labels? Is it a country vs. city thing? Is it urban snobbishness that keeps IKEA out of the southern Central Valley? Or is it even – gasp! – the fact that despite its prehistory as an ocean of its own, the Central Valley is totally landlocked, with not a Pacific wave in sight?

All but one of the California IKEA stores are located in coastal cities. The Sacramento store is the only location that could be considered inland, and it’s just a skip from the San Francisco Bay area.

But I can’t lay these accusations on IKEA alone. Most of California seems hardly to know that the Central Valley exists. There’s the coast, the coastal mountain ranges (where you go for all your trendy wine), and then there’s these pain-in-the-neck higher mountains you have to drive through or around to get to Las Vegas.

Omaha, Nebraska.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 68666 (never mind the Antichrist stuff; been there, done that); where are you from?
ME: Stromsburg.
CLERK, smiling broadly: Stromsburg, hey! My uncle lives in Osceola. Yeah, we go to the Swedish Festival in Stromsburg every summer!

San Jose (San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, coastal), California.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 93292; where are you from?
ME: Visalia.
CLERK, bewildered: Is that in California?
ME: It’s about 40 miles south of Fresno.
CLERK: Fresno?
ME: City in the Central Valley? About 450,000 people?
CLERK, brow clearing, dismissive shrug: Oh! Small town.

I did not make that up.

C’mon, IKEA. Uphold that Swedish reputation for lack of prejudice. Visalia (pop. 124,000), planted at nearly the halfway mark between Fresno (450,000) and Bakersfield (347,000) seems to me the ideal location to tap a pretty sizeable market base.

Välkommen!

IKEA responds (via email, May 24):

Hello Kate,

Thank you for your interest in IKEA. We appreciate that you have taken the time to contact us.

We are constantly in discussions with city, developers, and brokers about potential opportunities for an IKEA store. However, with only 37 stores in the U.S., we focus on new location areas to be consistent with our U.S. and global expansion strategy.

(Approximately 15-20 stores open worldwide each year and we must balance our emphasis on variety of regions and countries around the world.) 

That being said, we do recognize the customer base that would exist for us in many areas, but currently have not committed to a timeframe for opening an IKEA store in your local community.

Of course, we appreciate demonstrations of support and desire for us to enter the local community.  We continue to evaluate areas that may be appropriate for locating an IKEA store based our unique business model and size of our stores.  In the meantime, you are welcome to visit our current U.S. stores as well as to visit IKEA-USA.com.

We hope this information has been helpful and  thank you again for contacting IKEA.

Best Regards,
Jennifer
IKEA Customer Care Center

KATE says:

Dear Jennifer,

You're a sweetheart for taking my tongue-in-cheek seriously. Just boot Visalia a little higher on your to-do list, huh?

Thanks for responding!

Kate

Vacuuming the lawn and other things we do differently here in sunny CA

Yes, it really sucks.
It was one of the first small appliances we bought when we moved here, a cute little Shop Vac that wails at a few decibels less than its bigger cousins, picks up big dirt, and hauls easily around the yard.

Ron, of course, reminded me that we had left two larger, perfectly serviceable Shop Vacs back in Nebraska. I know. Just get out the credit card; it’s the California way.

Back on the farm, we used the Shop Vacs to suck ladybugs by the thousands, dead and alive, out of the basement, the attic, out of the kitchen corners and out of every ceiling light. They had other uses, but ladybug sucking was their primary job.

Ladybugs (and basements, much to Ron’s chagrin) are pretty scarce in the fierce heat of the Valley, but the new Shop Vac has become just as indispensable as the old. Its most unusual application to date has been to suck a hole in the lawn.

Originally, the hole was filled by an in-ground sprinkler head meant to pop out of the ground and spray a carefully measured shower of water across the lawn. Only on designated watering days, of course. One morning, however, the entire fixture blew out of the ground, and once Old Faithful was throttled by the auto off, dozens of the little pebbles previous homeowners considered integral to the landscaping cascaded into the hole and clogged the irrigation line.

Enter the Shop Vac. With the aplomb of an experienced dental assistant, Ron stuck the hose into the hole, sucked it clean of pebbles and water, then screwed the irrigation fixture back into the line. On the next watering day, it worked perfectly.

The Shop Vac’s #1 use, however, is taking down spider webs.

Spiders proliferate in this climate. Spiders of all kinds, of all sizes, to every degree of lethality, from spindly Daddy Long-legs, to hairy and mostly harmless tarantulas, to those biting bitches, the Black Widow.

I have come face to face with some scary specimens in all the places I have lived, but I have never felt outnumbered by spiders the way I do here. Spiders spin in open corners and lurk under flower pots and chairs. They make themselves at home in bookshelves, closets, behind the refrigerator, even in the fireplace. They swing like Tarzan through the garage, and in the yard they wave hello from fence posts, tree leaves, shed eaves, even from drains in the ground.

I have picked up my purse to have a spider drop from it on a silken trapeze. I have turned around to come eyeball to eyeball with a spider staring at me from the side of a bowl on the kitchen counter.

It’s like God had a late brainstorm about spiders and dumped them all in the Valley to find their way around the world from here.

Where the spiders go, so go their silken webs. Spider webs tether patio chairs to the table. They criss-cross rose bushes. They appear overnight in doorways. Spider webs in the corners of the laundry room catch dryer lint. Hummingbirds aren’t real keen on feeders stuck all over with spider webs.

Back on the farm, I used to trap the occasional spider visitors between a glass and a piece of cardboard and toss them outside to find a home of their own. Here in the Valley, I have had to add arachnicide to my list of new skills. Raid Ant & Roach Killer (kills spiders, too) is the first friend I made here.

Spiders and their webs are a four-season, inside and out cleaning job. The wail of the Shop Vac puts spiders on notice: We’re coming for you.

Sucks, doesn’t it.

The center of it all

Before I lived here, I called California The Land of Tiny Dogs.

And The Brown State.

And The Land of Wooden Fences.

And The Nanny State.

I haven’t changed my mind about any of those. Sorry.

But now that I live here, my perceptions of The Golden State are changing. There’s still room for expansion of the list above, but I’m quite enjoying everything I learn about California.

Ron and I moved late last summer to Visalia, the Tulare County seat and the prettiest big little city in the San Joaquin, a.k.a. Central, Valley.

Several of my siblings decamped from our birthplace, Buffalo NY, decades ago to join spouses in the Valley. As grandchildren started arriving, my parents also moved out here.

I resisted the move, preferring the more temperate climate and Old Commonwealth sensibility of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Ron and I met online – without the help of dating sites, thank you very much. He pried me out of Civil War country to live on the old Burke farmstead in central Nebraska.

Red state? Oh, yeah. But conservatism at the heart of the country is rooted (read the pun) more deeply than ideology. Farmers place their trust in God, family and the land, in that order. They love America in ways their cosmopolitan counterparts may never comprehend, but they don’t have a whole helluva lot of confidence in any government or bureaucracy. Independence is more than a history lesson to them. Do for yourself or do without.

But one day we realized that scooping snow sucks. Mowing an acre of grass is sweaty hard work, and gets more laborious and time-consuming every summer. Ditto for fixing fences and chasing stray cattle.

Don’t get me wrong, and don’t laugh at Nebraska’s informal state motto, "The Good Life." It is a very good life, and I learned more there about the big questions in life than I ever learned sitting in university lecture halls.

But it was time to move on. We handed the farm house to the next generation, left the farming in the capable hands of a neighboring farmer, and headed west.

California. A different kind of place, no matter where you’re coming from. Blue state, for starters. Hardly do-it-yourself types, with everything from toilet scrubbing to tax preparation hired out. Lots of sun-cured vegetarians. Six cars for every garage space. Leaf blowers.

Yet for all the differences between this and every other place I have lived, I am finding out that there is much to know and appreciate about California.

From the little gem that is Visalia, I have a center-of-it-all observation point, and a base grounded in the rich agricultural traditions of one of the most fertile valleys in the world. Directly to the east of the city rises the Sierra Nevada, throwing up a formidable wall of stone and tree between California and most of the rest of the nation.

To the west, the Coast Ranges shield Visalia and the Central Valley from many of the social and cultural pressures of the densely populated coastal cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Visalia is a southerly link in the chain of cities along Highway 99, which traverses the flat Valley north to south, Sacramento to Bakersfield. From Visalia, it is easy to get to distant points of this enormous state.

And it’s a pretty place to come home to.