Eau Claire, blizzards and shoveling snow...

Mike and I packed up the small hound and headed to Eau Claire, Wisconsin for the Thanksgiving holiday. We stayed at the GrandStay (Mike's new team's main sponsor), and the rooms have complete kitchens and so we cooked a little Thanksgiving dinner, and enjoyed some "away-from-it-all" time. Eau Claire is a lovely college town with many rivers and rolling terrain in the Chippewa Valley of Western Wisconsin. It's really beautiful. We'd hoped to do some riding while we were there, but it snowed and so Mike went and rode off-road, while Sydney and I kicked it in the hot tub and watched HBO in our room!

Then on Saturday we went to race in Hudson and made it home before the weather really spiraled downwards. Yesterday we had "freezing rain" and I almost killed myself walking down our driveway which was more like a mini ice arena. I even backed the car out of the driveway and then couldn't get back up until I got a running start on the street---no traction in the ice. Mike actually braved the weather and headed out on his mountain bike and said he couldn't ride on the roads because they were "ice" and so he rode the ditches all the way to Camden. He even got a little lost taking the backroads home (well---not lost, it's not possible to get lost in Marshall...but he wasn't exactly sure about where he was since he had to stay off the roads.)

BUT THAT WAS NOTHING! Now we have a "blizzard! The wind is blowing all the snow all over the place so you can't see too far in front of you...schools have closed. It's wild! I walked to work this morning as I'm not ready to slip and slide on my bike and I'm also not ready to drive---so I bundled up and walked and it was really quite nice. When I got home though you couldn't tell the street from the driveway from the lawns and there was a half a foot of snow in my driveway.

So what'd I do? I shoveled! Or tried to. I cleared the walkway and the driveway and Sydney just sat there with her little red coat on watching me...shivering and not helping at all. She loves (likes) the snow, but she hates the wind. It scares her. The snow is falling so much that shoveling is like a work of futility; as soon as I cleared a spot and started somewhere else, in just minutes it was covered in snow again.

My first Minnesota blizzard. Stay warm!