[SLO]

Originally Posted by BTinSF

^^^The dirty little secret is that it's all a lot PRETTIER in the winter because that's when all the grass on the hills, which is brown in summer and fall, turns green and lush. In the Bay Area, the rainy season starts around November 1 and it can rain 2 or 3 times a week until early May (some years it stops in March, some years May)--that's when the grass turns green and grows and also when I head to Tucson because I find all the rain kind of depressing. But from May through October, it typically doesn't rain at all in San Francisco although the Tri-Valleys can have an occasional (pretty rare, really) thunderstorm in summer.

Anyway, these photos are very interesting to me because I have to admit that I've never seen any of this area that you can't see from I-580. I used to work in Concord, so I've seen most of the stuff in your previous thread on Contra Costa, but the Tri-Valleys has always been just an area I had to pass through on my drive to Arizona.

PS: I think the wealthiest suburbs in the Bay Area are probably enclaves like Belvedere, Atherton, Hillsborough, Ross and some others, not anywhere in the East Bay. Even Blackhawk is an enclave for the nouveau riche--professional sports figures and such. The old East Bay money, at least by reputation, lives in Piedmont and maybe you might want to do a photo spread on that someday.

When we moved to Texas I was amazed to have the area around DFW green in late spring and very often all summer because of the relative humidity and the thunderstorms, but then it all goes brown in late November until April or so. That brown you mentioned there, we refer to as the golden hills of California.....