Here At Last

As you can see from the photo, there is snow here: here at the cottage which we finally managed to get to after waiting for a month. You may or may not recall that everytime that we thought to make the trip, it would either rain or drizzle freezing rain. Last week, we decided that we would drive here this week no matter what. As it turns out, the weather has changed, and we are to receive more typical temperatures for the foreseeable future.

You may also recall that we like to get out and snowshoe while we are here, and that certainly didn't seem likely for much of the trip here. There wasn't much snow lying on the ground for the greater part of the journey. This worried us, but although it is terribly distant from those snowless roads (only about a half hour north), the cottage seems to lie in a slightly different climatic zone. Sure enough, the closer we got, the more the snow was visible, and as we got quite close, we could even see it clinging to the branches from a recent snowfall. Here at the place that we call Riverwood, and as you can see in the picture, there is certainly enough snow cover to content us. As an added bonus, it was even snowing lightly this morning.

I took the two pictures yesterday after we had unpacked and cleansed the place when the sun was low and casting a rather fetching light. However, by the time I donned my outdoor winter garb and got the camera ready, the light was no longer quite as becoming, but I took some pictures regardless. The second photo, below, looks back along the driveway toward the gate by the road. I have taken many iterations of these two pictures, and I suppose that I shall take many more in future years.

Oh, and I must gloat over our sighting from the window last night. We see all sorts of tracks around here, but we seldom see animal life, and I understand that bobcat sightings are extremely rare, but that's what we saw — a bobcat! He was crossing the driveway from right to left and was almost exactly on the spot where I stood to take the picture (below). The cat obviously heard Cuppa calling me to the window because he turned and looked at us before trotting along the driveway toward the gate, prudently moving away from humans but not in undue panic, or so it seemed. I don't know how else to describe the gait other than trot, but it seemed somewhat different than how I usually see normal cats move. In any event, it was a brief but enjoyable sighting.