February is over and winter has shown signs of weakening, though it is supposed to get colder and snowy again later this week. But in the meantime, the dirty piles of shoveled snow are shrinking, revealing pavement that hasn’t seen daylight since mid-January.
Louis goes to Den Haag on Thursday for a basketball tournament, so Jonetta and I will take the train to Hamburg to explore and spend a couple of nights in a hotel while he’s gone.
In the meantime, I have a final batch of winter pictures. First are a couple of pictures I took while cycling home one afternoon about two weeks ago.
I think it was easier to ride back when it was very cold and snowy. They actually plow the bike trails with little tractor-plows. And where they don’t plow, the packed snow is often reasonably passable. Now there’s black ice most mornings.
An ‘isvinter’ in Denmark is when the Øresund and other coastal waters actually freeze so that they have to use icebreakers to clear the shipping lanes. There have been 15 isvinters in the past 100 years. This winter was not an isvinter, but it was close. The water froze for several kilometers out from shore. Here's a picture from Feb. 10 right after the water first froze—you can see how thin and smooth the ice is:
And then here are some from a few days later when the ice had thickened up some:
If you double-click the last picture you can see that the upright object at the end of the jetty is a six-foot beer bottle. This is the entrance to "Tuborg Harbor," you understand.
Here's one where I tweaked the colors a bit.
2 comments:
Great photos, and thanks for the update. All I can say is, it looks bloody cold! And it takes me back to my time in Den Haag, time that occupies a special place in my memories of hell....
We've had a mild winter in Seattle, so let's hear it for global warming (the rest of the world be damned!).
Love the updates and the writing that is so YOU! what great pictures. thanks!
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