Sitting here enjoying some landscape pictures on google search. Wow. It seems to be a great place to live.

Anybody living there or has anyone experienced Washington State?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/09/2016 03:01PM by sommarlov.

I grew up there. Truly a beautiful state. Rain forest in the west and desert in the east.

I've lived just outside Seattle for about 20 years and love it here. The climate is perfect for me, but the wet winters get to be a challenge. There's few places that rival this area for about 6 months of the year.

I live on the east side of the state. The PNW has lots of beautiful locations. Oregon has a ton of great spots as well.

Spokane is a nice. It's a happy medium between the two.

Completely different landscape and climate between Eastern and Western WA. No comparison. I wonder which pictures you're looking at.
I love the maritime climate and culture where I live (West of Seattle - West Sound). The temperatures are quite moderate, but rain can be constant and it can be very cloudy. For 4-5 months out of the year, the darkness and rain can get very depressing unless you use light therapy. The combination of northern latitude (short days) and heavily overcast skies causes it to be very dark here. We have entire days where it never gets brighter than twilight. The combination of rain and high winds will take out the power for days at a time. We have had one of the wettest years on record this year.

I second this. WA is the least sunniest state in the country. Beautiful during the nice days, but depressing in the winter.

*sighs* Again. You are talking about a 1/3 the area of an entire state. 2/3 of the state is not like that at all. If anything, Central and Eastern Washington suffer from too much sun, too little rain.

Do you like Ireland? The UK? BC Canada? Germany? Denmark? France? Western WA is like those countries. Overall, the state's weather diversity is more that of Spain.

While that is true, when anyone references how beautiful the state of Washington is, they're likely to be talking about the western part of the state.

Try to keep up. And I also pointed out the reasons I love it.
But YES, you will need a HAPPY LIGHT to live here.

I grew up in Oregon and I can't take the climate. It's even worse in Washington.

I hate having to explain this over and over again, but Portland/Willamette Valley, Eugene, etc., are not "Oregon." The are a part of Oregon. While beautiful, green parts with more sun than rain, the rest of Oregon--sunny, arid, and hot in the summer--is also glorious.

Most people think of that as "Oregon" because the eastern part of the state is sparsely populated.

I have spent most of my 50+ years in WA State, except for 10 years traveling in the military. Been to a lot of places, all over the country.

I live in the center of the state, on the dry side. Just about whatever climate and/or geography you like, you can find here. Hot in the summer, not too cold in the winter. Rainforest to desert. Towering mountain peaks and ski resorts, to wide open desert vistas.

I love it. Within an hours drive I can be snowboarding, water skiing, fly-fishing, or hiking the coulees and basalt canyons.

Puget Sound has the big cities; you couldn't pay this country boy enough to live there. Love that climate, but the traffic is killer.

The east side doesn't have the crowds, but it does have the Mormons. Pick your poison.

I was stationed at the Bremerton shipyards for a few months (a ferry ride away from Seattle) and I'm a student in the eastern half of Washington. I like the climate and culture in Seattle, but the cost of living is better in the east.

You surely would have noticed that the cost of living is MUCH lower than Seattle.

Washington--and/or Oregon--is/are the best state(s) in the US, whether on the western or Eastern slope of the Cascades. Both states have remarkably varied landscapes. The eastern sides of both states are sparsely populated, big sky country. I have a house in Central WA and can't wait to return.

photoshop can do wonderful things....

for the most part where I am its moss and rain...

and I almost forgot there is rain and moss..

even in the summer you get moss and rain...

You're only talking about 1/3 of the state, judging it rather harshly for its lush greenery, which (not remarkably) takes a fair amount of rain to produce and maintain. Other similarly beautiful places include Western British Columbia, 1/3 of Oregon, Ireland, the UK, Germany, and most of Scandinavia.

Just calling it as I see it -

"Other similarly beautiful places include Western British Columbia, 1/3 of Oregon, Ireland, the UK, Germany, and most of Scandinavia."

It's kinda purty where I live too.

http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.great-smoky.all.html

Many Scottish and Irish immigrants settled in the Appalachian Mountains because it reminded them of the highlands in their homeland.

You needn't brag. Appalachia is freaking spectacular.

We're recent arrivals to the Olympic peninsula. We live near the edge of the Olympic rain shadow. This is an area of Washington where much of the moisture is dumped as it passes over the Olympic range resulting in less precipitation in the region adjacent to the north and east. Parts of Washington here get about as much rain as Southern California. It's the best of both worlds.

The beauty is at times breathtaking. There are thousands of miles of coastland with all the inlets, bays and lakes. And there are lots of things to do. We get into Seattle about once a month, and enjoy taking the ferry across. Our side of the Sound is much more rural and forested, but we're just a short ride away from the ultra metropolitan Seattle.

We're enjoying it very much so far!

Awesome! Another peninsula dweller here! I've seen lots of people from Western WA on here, but never the OlyPen. I live in Sequim, work in PA.

_________________

When we left the midwest in 2004, we could have moved pretty much anywhere in the country. We chose here. We have never regretted it.

Western WA is interesting because there are a lot of microclimates here because of the intersection of mountains, ocean, and prevailing winds. Sequim only gets something like 11 inches of rain a year. But if you drive 45 minutes west, you'll get something closer to 80-100 inches a year.

There is one stake that covers the entire Olympic Peninsula. The Mormons are pretty easy to avoid and very few of them are like the Utah/Idaho/Arizona flavor of Mormons.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/09/2016 09:53PM by Strength in the Loins.

Is your power out today? The vicious wind storms last night were quite something. We're surrounded by 60+ foot cedars and pines, and we thought for sure one of them would come crashing down into the house last night. Fortunately we didn't have that happen, but we've been w/o power since about 7am this morning with no ETA for restoration. Funny we were talking earlier this week about getting a generator. Completed that purchase today. Glad to have an inverter running on the car for now with tethered LTE...

It would be hell for me to live without seeing the sun rise over a volcano like Mt. Rainier every morning and set over the Salish Sea at night, with the Olympic Mountains to the West.
Of course, days like today, I sure wish I was looking at rainbows on volcanoes on Maui.
It's wet.
If you can't take the wet, go to Maui.
I go to Maui a lot in the winter, to play with the whales, dolphins, seals and turtles in the sea. I love the sea.
I love it here too. I kayak, Stand Up Paddle, climb mountains, especially big volcanoes, like Rainier, Hood, Baker, St.Helens. I sail the Columbia and the Salish Sea. I sail up to Canada. It's an outdoor lovers paradise, especially in the Summer, but really all year long.

Grew up in west seattle. I live in the 'burbs now. Rarely home, but when I am, I love every second of it.

When he went to college he wanted to move someplace with different climate and culture. We have visited several times and it is indeed beautiful on the west coast and olympic peninsula.

He enjoyed it for a couple of years but after a while the rain and gloom gets a little tiresome. His real complaint is that there is quite lack of culture. High levels of poor education and backward thinking. The state health report says 60% of residents are overweight and 25% are obese, which makes 85% of the population in unhealthy condition. His current opinion is lots of fat people that hardly finished high school which leads to a lot of alcohol and drug abuse. Not a pretty picture. I've visited there several times and he is of course exaggerating, but something to think about if you are planning on moving to an area outside of Seattle area.

Grew up in Bellingham, relocated to Texas. I still have family up there and visit often. No place like it.

Someone on this site recommended the book "Another Roadside Attraction" which is now one of my top 5. Every time I read it I think about moving to Washington. It sounds so beautiful!

Western Washington lifer here.

I love Washington! Within three hours I can have anything and everything. Mountains, deserts, rain forests, oceans, rivers and waterfalls. Skiing, hiking, boating, windsurfing. Wine tasting and great local beers. Big cities, night life, small towns and quaint villages.

A few more hours and I can be in another country.

It rains quite a bit, but that's what makes it so green.

When I went to college in Rexburg, it was so brown/colorless there. I missed the vivid greens of the PNW. I remember driving home in the spring and coming through the Columbia River Gorge and marveling at the green that I had missed so much. The very air seemed to have a green tint. I felt like Dorothy in the Emerald City. Since I never really left home again, I've never experienced it quite like that again, but I've never forgotten!

Edit to add this link to this photo. This is a beautiful sight on the Washington side of the Columbia River, looking east into the Gorge.

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=cape+horn+skamania+county+wa&view=detailv2&&id=9156CB577CFFD16F1C3C276412CE8B3CD1DA9EBB&selectedIndex=83&ccid=Ehb7vMTk&simid=608042897580294829&thid=OIP.M1216fbbcc4e417da387ee6ee276737ebo0&ajaxhist=0



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2016 03:54PM by claire.