We got about a foot of snow in Seattle last weekend. It’s always dramatic and unusual when that happens, but it was here and gone, nothing like our last big storm in mid-February 2019. I remember that one well because I was trying to move that week, and because we had several waves of heavy snow, enough to bring down trees and close schools for days. Of course, with remote schooling in pandemic times there are few excuses for a snow day, and besides, this year’s snow all fell over the weekend, Monday was a holiday, and rains brought a big thaw by Tuesday. Kids, you were robbed.

Originally, I had planned to be in Tucson this week for a week of relative warmth and some high-desert hiking. But when COVID rates remained high in Arizona a few weeks ago, I canceled my plans and decided to do a short trip close to home. Plan B put me in a little Airbnb a mere stroll from Grayland Beach, a hard-packed expanse of sand that was close to deserted in the middle of this week in the middle of February.

I walked for miles on the beach, enjoyed a gorgeous sunset and some bald eagle sightings, and had the chance to meet my friends Cai and Marty for an impromptu outdoor lunch in a nearby town. When it’s warm enough to eat outside in winter (though we did each have many layers on), you know life is good. The quick trip was enough to start me dreaming of summer camping adventures, too. It won’t be long.

Although Seattle is on the salt water of Puget Sound, we are about 100 miles from the open ocean—and with heavy metropolitan traffic, it takes about two-and-a-half hours to get there. So I don’t go to the coast as often as I’d like, and every time I do, I swear I will do it more often. There’s nothing like it, and especially in a week where people in the heartland have had truly terrible weather, I need to remember how lucky I am to live where I do.

“Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rainforest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to,” Timothy Egan wrote in The Good Rain. He didn’t even mention the sea. It just is. How spoiled we are, we who dwell on the edge, we people of the best coast.