Why I love Victoria (2)

It's a sunny city.

Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages


Victoria is a sunny city. Don't laugh. It is! Victoria is the sunniest city in Canada outside the prairies. And when it's sunny on the prairies, it is usually so bloody cold that it freezes your proverbials. 

Victoria is sunnier than Montreal or Toronto, and all those other soggy cities down east. It ranks sixth in the list of sunny cities in Canada, in the average number of hours of bright sunshine, the average number of days with some bright sunshine, and the percentage of daylight hours that are sunny. That's sixth out of the 26 Canadian metropolitan areas that have a population of more than 150,000. 

Not only that, but everyone knows that the City of Victoria is much sunnier than anywhere else in the capital region, which is measured in the survey. It can be sunny in Fairfield, for example, when it’s raining cats and dogs in Saanich. So the more northern parts of the peninsular with their greater rainfall have skewed the stats, and the City of Victoria is probably higher on the list than sixth. Perhaps it's really the sunniest city in Canada. 

Rare are the occasions when the sun doesn't peep through the clouds at least once during the day. It's something to do with the little microclimate we enjoy on the tip of the island. The clouds swirl around, driven by  conflicting winds which blow the rain away. It can be raining one minute and sunny the next.

It's not unusual for rain to be forecast but not to arrive and it's sunny instead. I call this kind of day - when the weather forecast is delightfully wrong - an ARDIV: another rainy day in Victoria.