My little inland Orange County bungalow felt like an oven when I came home. My welcome was a blast of heat as I opened the front door and sweated through the haze to find my family reading or napping in the one room with an air conditioner. This was our July, August and September.

I had to escape. Northeasterners gone stir crazy from the cold become "snow birds," flying off to warmer climates. I wanted to be a "sun bird," winging away to someplace where an open window at midday didn't feel like the screen door to hell.

I was dead serious. Serious enough to contact the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Get me out of here," I fairly moaned. "I want to be cold."

Well, a friendly researcher said, there was Barrow, Alaska, where the average summer high temperature was a hair over 43 degrees.

Too far.

How about the top of Mount Washington, N.H.? The mercury tops out at an average high of 53 degrees. One problem, the guy at NOAA pointed out. Mount Washington is also where the highest recorded wind speed in the U.S. _ 231 mph _ was clocked in 1934.

Try again, I asked.

After a few more mountaintops and remote Alaskan villages, I snapped. Just tell me the lowest average high temperature of an urban area in the lower 48 United States.

A long silence. I figured Maine, northern Minnesota, maybe some Washington state town near the Canadian border.

"That would be western San Francisco," came the reply.

Of course, the fog.

My brother had gone to San Francisco State while I went to UC Berkeley, and I remembered many a summer day where it was 10, sometimes 20 degrees cooler at his place near the ocean than mine across the bay.

I packed my bags. I would go to San Francisco and hunt for fog. Cool, thick fog that would blot out the sun and blow away the dirty air.

After an hour in the air and another driving from San Francisco airport to the southwest corner of "the City," I had traded hot brown for cold gray.

Heading up the coastal route through Daly City, I could see that the fog doesn't creep in on cats paws, as in the Carl Sandburg poem.