This week Tea Towers was deep in snow and so most of our local schools were closed.
Time to get on warm coats and pokemon hats and get out in the snow.
Extra socks were needed to cope with cold toes.
Though short of carrots Sam still managed to complete his snowman’s features with a handy apple.
After warming up from snowman building we popped over to a friend’s house for a quick snow battle in their garden.
Sam taking revenge for a vicious snowball head shot.
Emily ready to take on everyone.
During the weekend before Easter I went up to Scotland to try out one of the trail centres up there. The trip had been arranged for some time as me and Dan wanted to make sure we got the nicer weather of spring. Obviously we didn’t get the weather we wanted… but we gave it a go anyway.
The trail centre is in Glentress Forest and promises some of the best mountain biking in the UK. We arrived to find a relatively clear car park but the snow on the trails was already 15cm deep and only got deeper as we climbed higher.
Dan climbs through the forest
The going was OK if you stuck to the foot wide channel that some other riders had carved into the snow. Deviating from the track meant a battle with the handlebar and pedals to get out of the deeper snow (before you had to plunge your foot into a drift). Once we reached the height of the Buzzards car park it was difficult to get much higher. We had a quick go on “Berm baby berm” but most of the berms were un-rideable and had to be waded round.
Wrapped up warm
At least the run down from Buzzard’s to the car was good – so good that we repeated the climb so that we could do it again. I had a good time but I look forward to returning to the trails in better weather one day.
Makes a good bike stand though
Now I’m stuck waiting for one of the many delayed trains.
Sadly there was a lot of rain yesterday and our igloo can no longer be called an igloo as it no longer has a roof.
Five days on from the creation of the igloo it is still standing but is now significantly smaller. There hasn’t been much in the way of new snow so it’s a tribute to BBC engineering that it has survived. I think today’s rain might be the final nail in the coffin though 🙁
The snow is melting quite quickly now but our igloo is still standing! The door has gone a bit wonky but the roof is still holding (just). Apologies for the photo quality – I authored this post on my iPhone.
I finally managed to get into work today and found some of my colleagues were about two layers into building an igloo. I helped out and the results can be seen below. Our igloo differed slightly from the traditional type but I was impressed that we managed to create the roof at all. If anyone can think of an igloo related pun let me know as I want one for the title of this post.
I’ve been writing a new photo gallery for the site but it is not ready yet so in the meantime you can find all my snow pictures on flickr. Two of the non-igloo pictures are from Kingswood this morning and the snowman is one I found in a field near our house.
Watched this guy try to move his car for a while whilst I was on the phone – he eventually managed it with some help. Seems 4-wheel-drive just means you can spin all four wheels at once. Added a weird version of Airwolf as the original video just had my phone conversation over the top.
Stuck at home today – I think a lot of BBC staff are attempting to use the remote access software and as a result it isn’t letting me in 🙁
There are some advantages though – the view from my desk is much better.
