Monday 15 December 2008

....and still it snows

It had been snowing solidly for 36 hrs when we got up this morning. We had had a disturbed night, first with the power flickering on and off, accompanied by the odd blue flash outside and bleeping telephone handsets and then by a mighty crack as the plum tree out the back of the house gave way under the weight of fresh snow. We discovered this morning that it had literally split in half. By morning, there was a good 2 foot of snow on the ground and we had to dig our way to the wood store.We had to leave Pissou to pick Jamie up from Carcassonne airport, but first we had to dig the car out of the snow!
However, without a 4 wheel drive vehicle, we were never going to make it the 1km up onto the main road. The chemin had not been ploughed and 6-8" of fresh snow soon brought us to a halt. I summonsed help in the form of Patrick, the dairy farmer at Col del Four, and his tractor and we made it out. But our normal route up over the Col de Port was closed due to the snowfall so we had a longer trip down to St G and eventually to Foix and Carcassonne. A trip that normally took 1.5 hrs had taken 4 hours. The trip back was uneventful and the Col de Port had, by that time, been reopened thank goodness. Jamie has already built a ginormous snowperson (pics tomorrow) because, after all, that is what 21 yr old students do! ;-) Hopefully we will have a ski at Guzet tomorrow and then a day en piste at Ax on Wednesday and a ski tour Thursday - all weather dependent of course!

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