Snow in the Snowy Mountains

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Friday 8 June 2007

We woke up this morning to see snow coming down outside our motel room window in the Snowy Mountain town of Thredbo. A light dusting of snow was on the tarp over our motorbikes, though it wasn’t yet sticking to the road. We packed hurriedly and left hoping we could make it over the pass just west of town before we got snowed in, but we met a really nice guy responsible for keeping the roads plowed who cautioned us against trying. There was already 5 cms of snow on the road in places higher up. He turned out to be another Ulysses Club member. After warming up back at his depot, we decided to turn around and head the 100 kilometres back to Cooma where we had stopped for lunch the day before. On the way we stopped for a cup of coffee in a small café 60 kms down the road and got to talking with someone at the next table, who by coincidence turned out to be the plowman’s wife. We asked her to thank him again for us . . . South of Cooma was a long extremely cold stretch of highway where we both nearly froze in the low sleet, trying to escape the unexpected storm. I don’t know how we’d have managed without our new long johns

The news tonight talked about a huge storm over much of SE Australia, high seas along the coast, beached tankers and heavy snow falls in the mountains. We are thankful to be out of the worst of it tonight in Bombala..

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Comments

[tao]

yay
fantastic journal more please. yay

[Carolyn Wells]

Just amazed
What an amazing story, and you've practically just begun! So glad you've set up this blog--it's my first and I don't know how these things work, but I thought I'd add a comment just to see what happens to it. By the way--about that beautiful Japanese garden--did the Japanese prisoners build it during WWII?? Please be careful in the snow--and here I was mostly worried about you getting much too hot in the desert! Hope those earplugs work to help the tintinnus, Theo. Would windshields help? I forgot to look carefully to see if you had them in your first pictures and couldn't tell for sure if you had them in later pictures but I don't think so. That Ulysses club sounds great--glad you've found them (and those polite Australan car drivers) so helpful.