I watch The Silo — dystopian, everyone trapped underground for generations, nuclear fallout, and my first thought is never “what a bleak vision of totalitarianism.” It’s “that loft space on level ninety is enormous.” Whatever the show wants me to feel about all that windowless grey, I mostly clock as great mood lighting.
This isn’t something Los Angeles gave me, either — it goes back further than that. Some people are built for sun, and I am not one of them. I grew up outside Buffalo , real winters, months of the kind of grey that’s less a weather pattern than a mood the sky is committed to.
I’m not a stranger to grey. I’ve just never once needed it to go away, which is an easier problem to have than needing the sun and not getting it.
Then I moved to Los Angeles, where summer isn’t really a season so much as the sensation of being sent out to clean every time I leave the house. I found out what I have isn’t a mild preference. It runs more like seasonal affective disorder in reverse — except instead of needing the sun, I need it gone. July hits and I go into a kind of reverse hibernation: blinds down, only outside before nine or after six.
For a while I told myself this was a personal quirk, containable, mine alone. Then a few years back I went to Ireland for an extended family trip. June, supposedly safe, supposedly grey, and it was hot and sunny the entire time.
My brain kept expecting one thing and my body kept reporting something else, which is a genuinely disorienting way to spend a vacation. (Catching COVID partway through didn’t help me sort out which was which.) I chalked it up to bad luck. One hot June doesn’t prove a theory.
Then this July I did a British Isles cruise on Holland America’s Nieuw Statendam — Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin, all of it — and it was hot the entire way. Europe, I’ve learned, isn’t built for that kind of heat the way American buildings are; air conditioning is either absent or treated as a polite suggestion rather than a constitutional right.
Not a knock on anyone — plenty of people on that ship were having the time of their lives, genuinely, and I was happy for them. I just don’t have whatever gene lets a person enjoy standing in direct sun with a camera.
At the Cliffs of Dover, I set out to walk to the lighthouse. I turned around less than halfway there — sun unrelenting, nowhere to get out from under it. That’s when I knew. Not “maybe reconsider.” Knew. Done doing this in summer.
For years I booked the summer trips anyway and marched out into the glare like it was a character flaw I needed to outgrow. It’s not a flaw. It’s just weather I’ve never liked, going back to being a kid in Buffalo, and pretending otherwise never once made July easier to stand in.
I still watch The Silo and run the numbers on level ninety like it’s an actual listing — no natural light, which I’d call a feature, not a bug, and legitimate Airbnb potential once the extinction thing blows over.
Everyone in that story wants out. I’m the one who’d stay, and mean it.
If you're the type who saw The Silo and thought "I could live here", you're not alone, and fall and winter are wide open for exactly that kind of trip. I'm a travel advisor, and I plan trips for gloom-seekers and sun-chasers alike, no judgment either way.
Let's talk about your next one.