Friday, February 17, 2006
Snow Day
Well this is something different. Today all schools in the Waterloo district have been closed because of an imminent storm which threatens to bring freezing rain, winds and snow. Freezing rain has occured here before but not to the extent this storm promises. For all you geographers out there (this means you Paul) freezing rain occurs when the precipitation temperature is above zero and the air and ground temperatures are below zero. The rain lands on objects such as cars, roads etc and freezes thus causing extremely dangerous driving conditions. We have witnessed cars on the road sliding backwards downhill after stopping on iced sections! Black ice is another problem. This is where the ground might appear dry or even wet with r
ain but darker sections are actually ice and one must be careful of these sections on roads and footpaths. So we await todays weather deteriorating into a nasty storm but it is 12.30 pm and no sign of it yet.We have been skiing twice a week now since we got here at the local ski hill, Chicopee. It is a 15 minute drive from home and was actually built on top of the old garbage tip site. Canadians are very resourceful when it comes to making good use of land, especially around this region as it is very densely populated. Chicopee has all day lift tickets for $30 but Jenny, Alex and I have been going after school with the school ski club and have managed to get hire, lessons and lift tickets for free. Alex has converted to snowboarding and has just purchased a board, boots etc. She has got a real bargain as all the sales are on now. Jenny is very excited because she can finally ski with confidence and is really enjoying the slopes. She has progressed to blue intermediate runs and when she went back to the green beginner slope she was surprised at how flat it now appears. We hope to go out and purchase some skis & boots
today (weather permitting) so that we can use them here and also bring back to Australia. We are also looking forward to travelling to Collingwood, a large ski area with a number of ski resorts. I am especcially looking forward to this as Chicopee has very short runs.We also discovered a park in the middle of town which is obviously very popular in summer but not so when we walked through. Even though it was a sunny day with clear blue skys the temp was still -5 so kept the locals inside. We enjoyed the walking paths and crunching through the snow which felt like you were walking on corn flour. Alex wanted to walk on the iced lake as she saw signs of others who had tried it but we convinced her that it was not such a good idea since the lake would have very variable ice thickness and we were not going in to rescue her.
# posted by Dibbo @ 4:11 am 
