Snow Days

I think we accidentally packed some New England winter in our suitcases and brought it with us. We have had three big batches of snow since moving here, and usually they only rarely get a dusting during the winter...

The most recent storm, Beast from the East Part 2, snowed us in from Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening. The thing about it is, they don't actually get a huge amount of snow, but it's so unusual here no one is equipped for it. In this case we got about four inches. The county workers put grit on all the roads, which probably works great for an inch or so, but doesn't do much when you get anything more. No plows run on any of the county roads. I think they might plow the major roads from time to time because when we drove into Oxford it looked like maybe a path had been plowed, but that's it. Last time it snowed we went out driving after it started to melt and the roads were crazy. In most places, busy two way roads were one narrow lane for long stretches. (Not that roads here are ever particularly wide or really accommodate two-way traffic very easily, but this was even worse than usual).

This photo is my attempt to show you how crazy the roads are but you can't really tell from this picture. This is a relatively big road, with regular two-way traffic. There were lots of accidents, and we saw lots of cars spun off on the side of the road, and also a half dozen abandoned cars, that had gotten stuck in the snow and were just left until it melted.

Here are some village roads. You can't really see the road here, but it's underneath there somewhere!

Another village road. This is one of the main roads into our village. In this picture only an inch or two had fallen, but you can imagine that it will be solid snow in a few more inches.

Anyway, since the strategy here seems to mostly be to just wait for the snow to melt before resuming normal activities, that's what we did. Fortunately we didn't have anywhere to go, as church got cancelled on Sunday, so we went for a walk and stayed cozy inside.

 Here we are setting off for our walk. Now that we live in the country, the kids always start off any snow outing by eating snow...

Snowy village, snowy stream in our backyard, snowy walkers...

Looking down on our village from our hike. In the second picture you can see the village church from afar. Our cottage is across the stream from the church.

When we came inside, we ate popcorn and drank hot chocolate.

Then we went back outside to build a snowman. His name is Snowy.

One last picture of the snowy stream from our yard.

I have put the snow clothes away in the shed twice now and had to get them back out. Almost unbelievably, I am hearing rumors of a Beast from the East Part 3 next weekend. So I'm keeping our snow clothes out until July!!