Snow!

I'd love it too if I could get home :(

Very nice! I passed through there on the trans-Canada just one time when I was a kid, and I still remember it, hauntingly beautiful area.

More and more of the white stuff today..

Don't tell me it is pretty unless you enjoy deep puncture wounds...

It is useful, now you can go skiing! : ) It also helps reflect the light from our flashlights making them light things up a whole lot better

lol!! thats sad you cant get home, where are you stuck for the time being? I must say my subaru awd had gotten me through all of the major snowy downpours we have had, and its fun to boot!

and sb56637, it is beautiful, mainly around winnipeg. Near ontario is where it starts getting absolutely gorgeous on the trans-canada hwy. once you pass winnipeg and get into saskatchewan, well its another story. Unless you find pure field as far as the eye can see a beautiful thing lol :)

We had a bit of snow here last Monday and the city was shut down for basically the whole week....

There also tend to be a lot of timid drivers here who even abandon their vehicles in the middle of the road if they slip even a bit, so generally it's not a good idea to venture out even if you are comfortable driving on slick roads.

I feel the need to rant.

I left the village of Glenmavis at 08:30 this morning - there was a metre of snow on my car and no chance of the roads being cleared any time soon. I've been snowed in 225km from home since Saturday.

It took me over an hour to walk to Airdrie Station.

Get on a train at 10:12.

It stops half way there - at -6oC and no heating on the train. For two hours. THEN they tell us it is broken and they can't fix it. And there are no more trains to Queen Street for 24 hours.

Eventually give up. Thanks First ScotRail - aka a bunch of useless £@$%^& who couldn't keep a bus pass in working order, let a alone a railway.

Take a bus and taxi to Glasgow Queen Street.

About an hour later a train turns up heading in my direction. Except it needed a crew change in Perth and nobody there knew how to drive that sort of train. This is now about 80km from where I started and it's already taken longer than the total journey time ought to. Then it takes them SIX HOURS to look through the "Big book of excuses" to figure out why these losers can't get a working train to Perth in order to head north. Six hours in a station at -4oC. No extra clothes - I didn't take any as I was just going to be away for a day. I've been wearing the same clothes for a week now.

After six hours and increasingly psychotic messages from the centrally controlled automatic system which was talking about trains known to need pulling off the line with a crane as "delayed". Yep! Delayed till March 2011.

Thanks Scot Fail! You've done it again.

Increasingly baroque lies from the station staff. To be fair to them, their managers were lying to them.

But the automated system kept stepping on the station staff trying to tell us what they knew.

Six hours later, they put us on a bus to Dundee.

We get there around 21:00. this is the half way point - about 110km from where I started and about 110km to go.

OK there will be a train in 20 minutes.

Except its doors froze solid at Leuchars and wouldn't close. It isn't all that cold - around -6.

This can only be described as complete and utter incompetence.

So after a couple of hours in Dundee Station - There is one good thing to say about Dundee - the ring road lets you get out of there fairly quickly. I reckon they ruined the city when they put a speed limit on the ring road. There is nothing wrong with Dundee that a couple of fifty megaton weapons couldn't fix.

So a couple of hours in Dundee station. Their station staff were rude, aggressive and lying. These guys would do well at NeverBuying.com

Eventually they find not one, not two, but three trains. Or so they said.

So I ended up on the grossly overcrowded first one as nobody in the station believed that the other two trains existed. Including a lot of First ScotFail employees.

So I eventually get home at 01:00, sixteen and a half hours after I set out. On a bad day it would have taken 4 hours.

Last time I use one of First ScotFail's conveyances.

Yes the weather is awful but it hasn't snowed today and the temperatures are a lot milder 225km south of here than they are here (Currently -10). -30 is not unknown so why are things freezing solid (Like the brakes of the train I was on initially and the brakes of the train sent to retrieve it).

If you are in the UK. DO NOT travel by anything belonging to the First Group. You will regret it.

And this complete disaster cost me $80

How many Chinese lights have that effectively messed up your life?

I think it's time for lawyers at dawn.

I have to ask - didn't you go by car? How are you going to get it back?

Impressive rant. I (as many Brazilians do) think that Europe is a big Swiss clock - expensive, but flawless...

Anyway, I've read this some time ago....

“Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians”.

I've always loved that heaven/hell quote. And agree with it though I only know one Italian and he is an extremely good cook. Well, he ought to be, he runs a restaurant.

My car is not suited to driving in snow. The ground clearance is about 6cm, the tyres are far too wide and the engine power is far too high - this device is better suited to good roads. Good roads are something we could use more of - or at least a lot of salt and sand on the roads. Instead, we got snow and more snow. Then some more snow. then a lot more snow.

8 hours after this was taken there was 20cm more snow on it.

When I go to collect the car, I'll take a bus - not operated by the First Group - to Glasgow and a bus (Again not operated by the First Group) from there to Airdrie, then walk to the village once there is a lot less snow. If I can't find a non First Group bus or train from Glasgow to Airdrie, I'll walk the 25km if I have to. First Group will never get another cent from me.

The snow was melting where the car is abandoned today but it will have refrozen tonight.

Meanwhile, I have borrowed my mother's car which is much smaller, has narrow tyres and a lot less power. It is a lot better suited to driving in deep snow.

The roads were closed at three places on the route I'd have had to take had I been able to get the car out of the village it is in - that would have involved about 6 hours' work with shovels and 4 people pushing the car till I could get the tyres to grip.

As for Europe being like a Swiss watch. The bits of it I have lived in aren't. The banlieux around Paris are probably almost as bad as the favelas. There are parts of every city I know about in Europe where it is not safe to go. I've spent a lot of time in a part of Madrid where you dare not go outdoors after dark.

Ask about Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The worst airport in the world in my experience. Europe does have its problems - many things do work well but a lot of things don't. The second worst airport is Bulawayo in Zimbabwe which has almost certainly got worse since I was last in it in 1985. Almost equal to it was Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg in South Africa which has probably improved since 1985. All three are best avoided. Even if I have to pay a lot more, I will never go to Charles de Gaulle airport again.

Everywhere in the world has its good bits and its bad bits. The trains in Holland have the best coffee anywhere. But it is extremely expensive. The coffee in British trains is expensive and awful. But talking about coffee to a Brazilian........

For reference, my favourite airport anywhere is the one in Madrid. Not that I like airports but Madrid is the best one I've experienced anywhere. And I don't speak Spanish and almost nobody there speaks English. Almost the only Spanish phrase I know is "Habla Ingles?"

Thanks for sharing.

Some very valuable knowledge about snow and traveling has been posted here. I hope you can get to your car soon enough.

Nespresso is aggressively marketing it's coffee here. I like it, but I prefer the inconstancy of the local coffee. It's not always excellent but sometimes you hit jackpot....

The coffee is one reason I've always wanted to visit Brazil. I do drink a lot of coffee.

Hey,

I think the best coffee is available everywhere in the world (we have lots of imported brands here). You no longer need to come here just for that. But there will be a World Cup and Olympic games...

Situation report

Yesterday was windy. We have new wind speed record 172Km/h

Somewhere the wind push out the water from lake Balaton. (Waves)
In the west part snowing, east part of the country raining.
Some place the rain is too much, flooding problems....in the eastside of the country
We in west, cold, windy and snowing
But, we are a small country. The weather is a little crazy

Yesterday weather "live" on idokep.hu with some pictures, (my favorite weather forcast page) with Google Translate.

//// idokep.eu live Central Europe weather forcast. Local (country) idokep.hu ////

Dam I have to visit China

172 km/h!!?? wow that is hurricane strength. there must have been a fair amount of damage!

We are young into december and we are looking at -30c windchill here (-27c without the wind chill)....

and Don, that is a LOT of snow you have there!

When I worked in Shetland in 1989 the winds once reached 330km/h.

Two people died when they were blown into the sea not far from where I was working.

RAF Saxa Vord was getting new domes put over the radar antennae. Some of those radomes landed 200km away in the Atlantic.

Where I was working the waves broke over the house I lived in when we had high winds. 300m from the shore and the house had three floors.

High winds are no fun at all.

Not by local standards. Where the car is abandoned, it is very unusual for the time of year. It is not unusual in bad years in February/March. I'd have thought this wasn't a lot of snow by Canadian standards.

Fortunately the white stuff is melting rapidly here - but not where I dumped the car. I had hoped to collect it this weekend, but no chance of that happening now.

Where I had hoped to be at the end of the month has several metres of snow on it. I'm not even about to try to get a car to my long range light testing area.

Guess I'll be driving a bus to get folks to work here instead. (For the last 20 years I've provided a bus to get folks to where I work on the days that public transport doesn't)

The white stuff has (temporarily) vanished so off tomorrow to get my car before a lot more of it lands on Wednesday night according to the forecasts.

Just arranged overnight accommodation for the assistant with her pal Sonny.

http://www.youtube.com/v/9i94hbZ1hns&hd

The soundtrack is from Sonny's owner's last band. His current band is to be found here.

Cool! Who sings that song Don?

A guy called John Martin. The band was called The Dawntreaders. The song is called "I could eat you whole" which seemed appropriate. I went to see his current band playing on Friday night which was fun.

John and I were at college together and he worked for me for around four years till he went and got a real job. He's currently a deputy headmaster of a school in Aberdeenshire.

His wife will never forget the first time she met me.

http://misssymartin.blogspot.com/2008/05/wasp-factory.html