Minus 14 - so read thermometers in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, recently. Regina resident Warren Holtby, 76, had just left the golf course - in Lompoc.

“I shot 90 today,” he said, grinning, during an interruption from his hotel's guest computer. “But we just play for fun. We play for quarters.”

Holtby's last round on the Regina links came in October.

A tall man, maybe 6-foot-3 with white fringe below a sizable bald spot, Holtby is surprisingly agile for his age. He moves like a bespectacled big cat. A publicity campaign brought him here originally.

“The first time we came out here they had advertised in the newspaper,” he remembered. “They said the weather was good.”

Holtby arrived at LAX for his first visit to Lompoc on Jan. 17, 1994. Sure enough, the weather was good, but he remembers it most because it was the day of the Northridge earthquake.

“The lamps were swinging.” He laughed like a teenager at Magic Mountain. “Since then I've had a room on the top floor.”

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Given a January-February choice between swinging and subzero temps, Holtby, a retired accountant, has come to Lompoc every year since.

“We've met so many people, from Washington, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton. Not so many from Saskatchewan. A lot of them go to Palm Springs.”

He and his wife Donna are in Lompoc for two months. They are among 50 Canadian couples lodged at Quality Inn & Suites on North H Street. Happy Hour turns the inn's community room into a raucous Calgary tavern.

Many of the snowbirds, like Holtby, have wintered here since the last century. Each January brings a hugs and back slaps reunion.

“They come here for golfing,” said Vangie Leary, the inn's Assistant Manager. The inn publicizes a golf package which includes lodging and daily greens fees for $2,255 a month. The vacationers then need only pay for meals and choose a golf course: La Purisima, Village Country Club, Solvang's Alisal, or Rancho Maria in Santa Maria. This package advertised in Canada 15 years ago touched off the annual migration.

The Holtbys have sampled other vacation spots - Phoenix, Yuma, Palm Springs, and Hemet, but Lompoc won out.

“The golf courses in Phoenix are expensive,” Holtby continued. “And they're too sandy. Out of bounds there's cactus and rattlesnakes.

“You can't get a better golf course than La Purisima. They treat it like a baby.”

Warm weather and golf may be the major draws, but so are U.S. retailers.

“We buy a lot of clothes here,” Holtby confided. “I can buy a golf shirt at T.J. Maxx for $15. It costs $80 in Canada.” A pro shop would mark it up to $100, he said.

Donna Holtby shook her head. “He has so many golf shirts the closet is full.”

She doesn't look for golf shirts but she is a shopper. “We don't have Mervyns, Ross, or T.J. Maxx. And I'm looking forward to seeing Kohl's.”

The duty-free maximum per person has been raised to $750 by the Canadian government, so vacationers can truly load up. Clothes and wine appear to be the hottest tickets.

Moreover, the money exchange rate now places the Canadian and U.S. dollars within a penny or two of one another, so northern visitors no longer face costs 40 percent higher.

“I've come down here when it was 60 cents,” Holtby exclaimed.

Monarch butterfly groves, Hearst Castle and the nearby elephant seal refuge, Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara also attract the vacationers but the best never-in-Canada event that Lompoc has to offer is a space launch.

Holtby rocked into a grinning, eye-sparkling story of tailing a local at 2 a.m. past the Vandenberg main gate to a viewing stand and a front row seat. “When I got back my wife was still asleep. She said, ‘You didn't go anywhere. Oh yes, you did. Your coat's been moved.” Holtby beamed like a mischievous 8-year-old after a solo trek for ice cream.

These middle-class visitors: sales managers, business owners, civil servants and professionals, pump a chunk of change into Lompocans' pockets.

“Just the 40 or 50 of us inject a couple hundred thousand dollars into the economy,” declared Bob Jones of Selah, Washington, one of the few Americans at Happy Hour. “That's just in rental, golf fees and restaurants. Maybe half a million.”

Jones knows municipal income. He's mayor of Selah, near Yakima. He was just re-elected to his fourth term.

“I wanted a city that was safe, that's the No. 1 priority. One where you could get around and still have all the amenities - Lompoc has them.”

Traffic and population work against the more well-known vacationlands, he said. Lompoc's smaller population and no freeways offer a rural feel the visitors covet.

“We've never felt threatened here,” Jones went on in campaign mode. “The sidewalks are clean, the alleys are clean, and believe me I drive around and check. Your alleys are paved. Whoever the mayor is and the City Council, they can be proud. You really don't have a slum. A lot of times I try to pattern my city after what I see here.”

Mayor Dick DeWees was nowhere in sight.

But Jones is an American. How do the folks from Canada, a nation known for its, well, niceness, feel about Lompoc?

Holtby offered the final word. “It's easy to get around. It has very nice people. It has good restaurants.” He hesitated, visualizing prairie Saskatchewan and its homey small towns.

“It reminds me of Moose Jaw.”

Correspondent John McReynolds can be reached at 736-6352 or johnny544@verizon.net.

February 7, 2008