Enter the Schne

One of the best jobs in the world has to be plowing roads. It’s snowing out, you get to just cruise around with no real destination and just push snow, listen to the radio, drink some coffee, maybe help the occasional damsel in distress..not a bad life I think. Only if you’ve got a proper plow though…none of those tiny sidewalk plow things. Those are a real plow trucks retarded younger brother.

Sadly though that doesn’t seem to be a job that exists here in Europe. Their philosophy on snow plowing, which I was rudely reminded of this morning, is to not do it, rather to allow the cars themselves do the plowing. Not a bad plan until you realize that we live in the real world and most cars suck in the snow. Most drivers are even worse.

On the other end of the extreme is good old Juergen Point road where my parents live. While the Swiss seem to ignore the snow that falls on the road on Juergen point the strategy is to pack the snow down and make a new road on top of the snow. This new road is a carefully constructed mix of salt and sand. Its rather effective but has the unfortunate side effect of creating enormous sand dunes on the corners each spring while coating the cars with so much salt that snow cant penetrate far enough to reach the paint.

So winter is back and to celebrate I went out to a Huttenabend last friday, basically just a party up at a ski chalet. The only problem was that it was about 10-15 deg C and there wasn't a centimetre, sorry inch, of snow. It wasn't much of a winter party but at least the beer was cold. The next day i headed up to the slopes with a few friend after the huttenabend and once again the snow was less than ideal, but the sun was out and they had an extreme skiing event going on. Unfortunately i didn't have my camera but here's a link to some pics that they have up at the mtn's site.

Thankfully global warming has changed its course. Must be the lower SUV sales.