Thoughts on Snowy Weather

We've had a lot of snow lately. Well, compared to the typical amount of snow this area sees.

Last week we had three straight days of crap weather. On the first two days, Matt had a hard time just getting out of his parking space to drive to work. (He had parked facing uphill, and each time he tried to get into the street, he would start sliding backwards. He ended up just turning around to go downhill, and taking an alternate route to work.) I don't like driving in bad weather anyway, and after adding in my UK driving anxiety, I decided to walk the kids to school.

On Wednesday, the walk was no problem. The kids were excited because of snow, and it wasn't extremely cold. After that, everything went downhill.

Yes, we did move from a state in the US that gets much more snow than our current location. Here are some differences:

• Colorado is prepared for snow. So when bad weather hits, you know that most of the streets (and even bike trails) will be cleared. Here, they'll put down grit, but there aren't plows going around making the streets safe to drive on. 
• Sidewalks are even worse. No one shovels their sidewalks here, so you just have to walk through it until everything melts. On Thursday, there was a decent amount of snow and slush on the ground during our walks, and I got quite a workout pushing the stroller through it. 
• Since neither the streets nor the sidewalks are very safe for travel, and this is unusual weather for the area, you might think that school would be cancelled for safety reasons. Wrong. I'm actually curious to know what it would take to cancel school here (but I don't want to find out).

Here are a few pictures of our walk from that second day.

 The temperature got high enough that day to start melting even what was on the sidewalk, and of course once the sun went down, it all froze. On Friday, the roads had maintained enough heat to be decently clear, but the sidewalks were solid ice. Matt drove the kids to school that morning, and I made the mistake of walking to pick Clara up at midday. We made it safely, but it was cold and took forever. Did I mention that I sold my snow boots before we left the States? I didn't think I'd need them!

I realize that this entire post sounds negative. But I'm keeping it real, and it was a very grumpy three days.

By the end of the weekend, the snow and ice was gone and things were back to normal. Now I'm back to my positive self and crossing my fingers that we can get back to the rain!