Thanksgiving spent in sunny Laramie, Wyoming with my sister & her family again this year. Laramie is about 70 miles north, but some 2000 feet higher in altitude, and significantly colder whatever the time of year. My sister told us to bring warm clothes so that we could take the children sledding.
Warm clothes were required, as the temperature was in the teens (well below freezing) and the windchill took it to below zero F. This is my brother, Jim, Sally, and Spencer getting ready to break necks. When you inevitably careen off the sled, the resulting face-full of snow melts on contact, but then freezes almost immediately again, so you are left with mini-icicles on your eyebrows and eyelashes. I see from the news, that Britain is in the grip of cold temperatures and snow again, but we really don't know we're born when it comes to cold.
This sledding area was just 15 minutes or so from the town. Sally, a senior in high-school now, is in the process of making applications to universities. She applied to the Univ of Wyoming, which is in Laramie (my brother-in law is a professor at the Uni, which is why they live there). Tuition and fees are quite a bit less expensive there than in Colorado. However, before we had even arrived at my sister's house, Sally said there was NO WAY she wanted to spend winter in Laramie.
I dunno - you can go cross county skiing in the same park, and it costs nothing other than equipment and time.
She'll kill me for posting this, but it is a tradition in the USA for seniors in high school to have a portrait taken. Nowadays it is almost compulsory to have them taken outside, draped around a tree or fence or something, which neither Sally or I particularly wanted. I wasn't expecting Mona Lisa either.....
Apologies to those of you who received our Christmas card at the end of LAST month. Andrew took another trip to the UK then, and I thought we might save a bit by having him take Christmas cards over and buy postage there. He was to have asked a friend to post them at the beginning of December, but he forgot that bit, and thought he'd be helpful by posting them himself in October. Sigh.
