If I hadn't moved to NC recently, Pat, I wouldn't understand what you mean by rain being "sort of dry" -- what I was used to calling rain in Seattle wouldn't even begin to pass here. People say Seattle is rainy -- and it is, in terms of number of days of rain in a year -- but Greensboro, NC gets more than half again as much rain as Seattle, measured in inches per year. The difference is that here, it falls at an inch an hour or greater, for a half hour or an hour at a time, and then it's sunny, hot, and humid for a week, where in Seattle it takes four or five days to accumulate an inch in the rain gauges. Well, and the other difference is that the summer is the rainy season here, where Seattle has most of its rain in the winter.
Where I am, there isn't much limestone (though I see limestone pebbles mixed in when someone drops a load of gravel on a driveway) -- they say this area is the foothills, but after 20+ years in Seattle, I haven't seen anything I'd call a hill since I passed Asheboro while moving here. Certainly nothing here that would keep me at home on a snowy day (but the ice sheets we get are something else -- I have a policy that if I can't stand up on a road, I won't try to drive on it).
Ah, well -- traded earthquakes and living in sight of a major volcano for multiple hurricane remnants per year and tornado warnings everyone ignores. Maybe I should move to Minnesota -- I know how to handle snow and cold weather after growing up in northern Idaho, and there hasn't been a volcanic eruption in that area in millions of years...
