Sunday 17 January 2016

Snow

It's at this time of year that I start thinking wistfully about Banff, and Grenoble, and Bellingham and pretty much any other pleasant place from which you can see the mountains. So it was important to leave York and find the relevant Yorkshire view. Which turned out to be this:
And there was much more snow than we expected. Our plan had been to have a bimble up to the Wainstones, do a bit of climbing, a bit of finding pre-historic carvings, a bit of searchig of geocaches, and to keep the kids interested and warm. But as we climbed up Carlton Edge, to everyone's delight, it looked like this:
You have to remember that Thea hasn't really ever seen snow. There was a good amount the year she was one, and we got in some reasonable sledging (and lost our beloved Olympus camera), but she doesn't remember it. Since then we've only had little flurries that have barely settled. Not enough to stomp in, let alone build a snowman. So she was pretty excited. It became apparent pretty quickly that even if we got to the Wainstones, we weren't going to be able to see them a foot under the snow, and we'd probably have lost Thea in a drift by then, so we just romped!
We played until the kids were properly cold and then retired to the car for hot chocolate. We drove back across the Moors, realising that it was shear chance that we had had such an amazing amount of snow. Carleton Bank is on the north-west edge, which had got all the weather. Once we had got onto the high moor, the snow was much more moderate. Once eveyone was warm again, we pulled into Newby Wood for some more romping in only a couple of inches deepness. We played and slid on our bottoms (it had never even crossed our minds to bring the sledge!), and managed to find a geocache without GPS, coordinates or clues. But we had been there before, so it was a bit of a cheat.

And we had lots of fun in the snowy car park, because Ian and I wanted to do doughnuts in our new toy:
Much fun!