We’ve had an interesting week and a half – weather wise. The calm weather of January abruptly came to an end when extreme weather “Ole” hit us on the 7th of February. The weather was wild the rest of the week, with strong winds and heavy snow showers. If you want to see me ridiculously excited about another half a meter of snow coming our way, click here and watch the first video.

Yesterday was International Winter Bike to Work Day, and I was determined to bike to work that day, come rain or shine. Come snow too… I have to admit, it wasn’t much fun cycling through deep snow. You basically have a choice of taking the main (busy) roads where you’ll no doubt annoy car drivers (the car vs bikes culture here isn’t very friendly, though it’s slowly getting better), or the smaller roads which are quieter. After my accident last year (I was hit by a car passing me too close) I refuse to cycle on the busy main roads. I have found a nice new route, but those quiet roads (and cycle paths) are not always cleared first thing in the morning, and the snow was so deep I sometimes had to walk. It took me half an hour to cover the 3 km to work (100 m uphill), almost double as much as in summer.

The only other colleague who cycles all winter is Misha. He doesn’t have a driver’s license, and cycles to work every single day – AND he tows a bicycle trailer with his twin daughters uphill to take them to daycare before coming to work. I’m impressed!! We decided to do a photo shoot for the occassion 🙂 which was lots of fun!

We recently got a bike shed at work, very fancy with a sliding automatic door 😀 but the path to the entrance hadn’t been cleared for a few days, and it took me half an hour to get through the deep snow!

From inside the bike shed you can clearly see that we have almost a meter of snow now. I also took a photo of my colleague Trond, who comes to work by kicksled every day – that looks like a lot of fun!

Meanwhile, Gunnar started clearing a path to our measuring site, and I took some photos of him in action. Daily life at the forecasting office in Tromsø 🙂

Today the sun finally broke through – in between more snow showers 😉 But it’s amazing how a bit of sunshine instantly turned the world into winter wonderland.

At some point it was snowing heavily while the sun was still shining – beautiful! I loved the dramatic skies today 🙂

The mailboxes clearly show how much snow came OVERNIGHT – I had cleared them the day before. We pay someone to clear our parking lot and road behind the house – I am very happy with that, as it would be a LOT of work to clear that large area. Unfortunately I’ll still have to dig out my car myself 😛

Tomorrow my friend Teresa is coming to visit for 3 days, and the weather looks quite promising – looking forward to some nice ski trips!!