Snow!

See? Snow! For those sceptics who said it doesn't snow in Canada. Huh!

Here's Rachel just before we go walking to a house in Dundas for apple cider and dinner. She's in shade so the contrast is really bad, but it gets across the whiteness of the snow. (Actually, a lot of the snow on the side of the road in town is brown...). The photo below shows Rachel and Daphne walking ahead with their ice-poker sticks.

We might be doing quite a bit of walking from now on as we don't have a car and don't have any plans to get one. Apparently cars don't last very long here in the cold climate. This is partly because they put salt on the roads to stop ice forming and this accelerates rust. So most cars aren't older than 10 years. This means that second hand cars are either new and expensive, or older, likely to break and still expensive. And new cars depreciate at a rate of knots.

Actually, the weather has been relatively mild all week. A mere zero degrees on average rather than the potential -20 it can get to. This is good and bad. Good because we don't freeze outside. Bad because the ice melts and then refreezes with unhappy results such as black ice on the roads. We're told that the last few winters have been getting warmer like this and that global warming may have something to do with it - or El Nino...

It has snowed just the one day so far and it snowed lightly all day adding up to something like 30cm.