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Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

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    Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

    So, two weeks ago we went north. They had just had two feet of snow the previous week. My father and law and I shoveled patch on the lake for the kids to skate. It was easily 18 inches deep, and it took us nearly two hours to clear the square patch you see in the first picture (taken this past Saturday).

    Then, last week, it warmed up for three days. The snow cover on the lake melted to a giant puddle on top of the existing ice and refroze. When we went up this Saturday, the entire lake was a massive, gorgeous sheet of ice. So we spent three full days skating it.



    My father in law with the kids.



    Me and him waving hello to mom. The guy in red, way in the back left, is ice fishing.



    And because the weekend wasn't Canadian enough, we went to see the dogsled races.


    #2
    Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

    Lovely pictures, WOM. It's reassuring to see Canada looking as we'd expect it to.

    One in the eye for the Climate Change Brigade there.

    I've always wondered - when you work out whether a place is safe for the kiddies to go skating on what do you do? Just send 'em out? Can you tell how deep the ice is from looking at it? Do you jump up and down on it, or is there some other mysterious technique such as asking the locals? And how do they know?

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      #3
      Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

      Thanks Rory.

      My trick for sussing out safe ice: when you see the locals driving their trucks out on it to get to the fishing huts, it's good for my forty-pounders. The locals tell by drilling holes in it.

      The ice on that lake is currently ten to fourteen inches thick. Anything over five or six inches is fine, which will take you from early December through the end of March.

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        #4
        Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

        My jealousy is overwhelming.

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          #5
          Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

          That's just about my version of hell.

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            #6
            Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

            Nah, that's what winter should be like. Everywhere. Great pics.

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              #7
              Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

              I miss snow snow much.

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                #8
                Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                Either I can't see the pictures, or there's an amusing "polar bear in a snowstorm" joke going on.

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                  #9
                  Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                  Well, after the last couple of weeks, I don't really want to see snow ever again in my life. However, I suppose it's okay if it's a 'weekend away' kind of phenomenon, from which you can return.

                  However, this reminded me of something that I was going to ask you, WOM: Just how common is snowmobile ownership in those northern parts? I mean, I imagine next to no-one owns one down in Toronto or Montreal, but I was wondering if they're actually more commonplace than motorcycles in places like Edmonton. ...Or do people simply lease them when the snow season arrives?

                  The other thing is, when you say "went North", where do you mean? That is, East coast, West coast or just central (i.e. due North)?

                  Furthermore, having looked at a map of Canada, there's about a billion lakes there. If it ever failed to freeze up, it would be a very different environment, wouldn't it - perhaps disastrously so?

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                    #10
                    Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                    According to the government department that handles such things, there are at least 2 million lakes in Canada, covering 9% of the country. And roughly 560 of those are at least 100 square kilometers in size.

                    Went north, for me, is two hours north-east of Toronto. That's fairly 'near-north' for anyone around here. Lazy, weekend travel, if you will.

                    And in these (rural) parts, snowmobile ownership beats motorcycle ownership by about ten to one. Everyone owns vs leases. I have a snowmobile, and Mrs WOM rides it, whereas she'd never got on a motorcycle.

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                      #11
                      Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                      WornOldMotorbike wrote:
                      And in these (rural) parts, snowmobile ownership beats motorcycle ownership by about ten to one. Everyone owns vs leases. I have a snowmobile, and Mrs WOM rides it, whereas she'd never got on a motorcycle.
                      Well, I must say I didn't quite expect that extreme a ratio!

                      I wondered about the leasing thing, in case it was only so seasonal that people didn't fancy the servicing costs when they were only going to use the thing one or two months a year.

                      Is Mrs WOM's acceptance of snowmobiles based upon the fact that they are, essentially, like a trike? Or is it that when you fall off one you tend to land in soft snow?!

                      Snowmobiles - if I recall correctly - are at least as fast accelerating as bikes, right? 0-60 in around 2 seconds for the sportier ones, yes?

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                        #12
                        Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                        One or two months? Anywhere north of Toronto, you can easily use them from mid-November through early April. The snowmobiling season is only marginally shorter than the motorcycling season.

                        I think Mrs WOM's acceptance is a combination of a number of things: one of her close relatives wasn't beheaded on one, so it has that going for it versus motorbikes. Plus, there's the added stability and the fact that it's her driving it, rather than being a passenger. I think that's always a confidence builder.

                        Snowmobiles accelerate like hell, but I couldn't give you a number. Like scooters, they have CVTs, so it's just gas it and go. Mine goes over 100 kph, and if you fell off at anything close to that, you'd be very sad.

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                          #13
                          Tedious winter wonderland pictures.

                          It's one of my life's ambitions to try a snowmobile. The one time I thought I was going to get to do it was a visit to my aunt's lake place in Wisconsin in January 2000, but when we were there, they had a freak warm spell and all of the trails were closed.

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