First Snow!

Before everyone gets too excited, I mean first snow on the mountains that we can see from our front windows. These are known as the Southern Alps. We woke this morning to rain on the roof and fogged windows. The temperature had dropped from 22 degrees C (72F) at 5 pm the evening before to a cool 5 degrees C (41F) in a little over 12 hours later. Brrrr! It was still fairly overcast when we headed off to school so it wasn’t until I came home from running errands that I saw the snow topped peaks across the Canterbury plains. I was able to snap this one good photo before the mountains were obscured with clouds again.

Since I wasn’t able to walk the kids to school today, I decided to take a long walk to get my exercise. I walked up our hill and got a beautiful view of the ocean. The water was teal and deep blue coloured with just a few clouds casting shadows. I thought to myself “what a gorgeous day this had turned out to be!” Then I headed down the hill that would take me past one of the kids’ favourite playgrounds. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I turned the corner and looked back toward home. There I saw a bank of black clouds hanging over the hills. I tried to convince myself that they wouldn’t get to me before I got home and even took a little bit longer path to take my favourite challenging track (nick-named “the death march” by Caroline Irving when she was here). Part way up that path, at a point where it wouldn’t have made much sense to turn back and take the other path, I felt the first sprinkles. The sprinkles turned to rock-salt-sized hail, which turned to baby-pea-sized hail, and when they turned to pea-sized hail I took cover under a tree. Within minutes the whole hail storm was over and I continued my walk. It was fascinating to see sheets of hail flow down this very steep hill. William would have loved it!

I got rained on a bit more before I finally reached home, but it was all in good fun. A warm shower and a cup of tea warmed me up quite nicely.