We still have nearly a month left of our first retirement winter away. We chose Puerto Vallarta this year and by our departure date, Mexico will have been a delightful place to spend five months. Honestly, we wanted to run away from the typical weather of New Westminster, BC. It's not that our part of Canada has extremely cold weather, it is generally just a bit gloomy and wet during the winter.
I decided to look at just temperatures today though. I will use the month of January for comparison. Here are average daily high and low temperatures for
Vancouver, BC and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Clearly, it has been a quite a bit warmer here than if we'd stayed home. We are much further south. Yet although at the same latitude as Hawaii, Puerto Vallarta's weather is not exactly tropical. I have spent many winters in places warmer than this. I also spent most of my initial winters in places that were colder. For comparison sake, I wanted to add a cooler city. Take a look to the right. These are the January temperature details for Concord, New Hampshire, USA.
Tropical weather looks much more like the first image found below as the details from Colombo, Sri Lanka are shown on the bottom left. The weather barely changes at all during the year as the country lies between 6 and 10 degrees north of the equator. Somehow, I was thinking that sort of weather is a perfect type of location to spend our upcoming winters. Destinations such as this include: Malaysia, Cambodia, Central America, and Southern India. However, we are very keen on spending next winter in Luxor, Egypt. The information on the graph to the right was a little surprising to me. Days are five degrees cooler than where we are now. And look how cold it gets at night in Egypt! I suppose as long as there's no need to get up early, we can sleep well at night under a few blankets. We would, at least, be guaranteed there'd be very little rain in the desert.