It’s Monday lunchtime and it has been snowing non-stop in Vancouver since Saturday morning. Even at our house (which is close to the sea) there is a lot of snow and it looks great. Downside is that it’s hard to drive in this kind of weather, we don’t have a heated driveway so last night I could not even drive our family car up to the garage anymore.

Alfred, a long time friend from Holland, is visiting for a couple of days, so we decided to grab the opportunity and do some snow sports over the weekend. On Saturday we drove up to Hollyburn Mountain where we went snowshoeing. It was snowing hard it was not too cold, so perfect weather to enjoy the trails through the woods.

So far I had only done green and blue snowshoe trails, but this time we also tried some black ones. Because of the fresh snow they were not hard at all, just a bit steep at some places. The scenery was amazing with huge amounts of snow on the trees, and when you stopped it was completely silent. We were surprised that we hardly met anyone else on the trails, despite it being a Saturday afternoon. After the snowshoeing we had a glass of wine in my rooftop terrace hot tub, while it was snowing hard. We ended the evening at The Boathouse in Horseshoe Bay for excellent sea food dinner with local a Pinot Blanc.

On Sunday Scott had his weekly ski lesson on Cypress Mountain, so Alfred and I decided to go skiing as well. The snow was fantastic with a huge amount of fresh powder. Finally some of the black diamond slopes were open, so we tried some of them. Pretty cool to be skiing through the trees with your skis invisible under a thick layer of snow.

When Scott finished his lesson he also wanted to ski through the trees, so we took him on an easy trail. He loved it, despite his basic skills (he only had 7 lessons of 2 hours each so far) he was not afraid at all and had a great time. After that he was so tired, however, that he fell asleep in the car on the way back!

The snow was supposed to stop overnight, but this morning it was still snowing hard. According to the weather report it should have stopped snowing by late morning, so I decided to stay home until lunch time in order to avoid the snow and the traffic jams. But instead of less snow it started to snow even harder…

We kept the kids home from school today: the school sent us a text message at 6:30 AM that classes would start an hour later, and then our kids’ teachers advised us by email that the roads up the mountain were in very bad condition so that we should consider to keep the kids at home. That was turned out to be a good idea, because the heavy snow caused a power failure and parents had to pick up their kids before lunchtime already!

Driving was quite a challenge, especially because I did not put winter tires on my car and because the roads in our area were not cleaned or sprayed with salt. I like snow a lot, but I don’t mind if it would stop snowing soon. It looks great but when you live in a city with lots of hills it can disrupt life quite a bit. One thing is for sure, next year I am going to get winter tires for my car!