Critical depth
We have now reached a sensible amount of snow.
This isn't a sensible maximum; rather it is the minimum amount where I only feel anxious rather than terrified by the drive from the shopping centre to the university. First, the road winds uphill beside the gorge through which the river Gléra heads down to meet the fjord. I use the term gorge deliberately as it's one of those steep-sided clefts with a narrow but icy river at the bottom. As is common here there are no crash barriers to stop you going off the road into the gorge should you lose control of your vehicle for some reason.
Secondly, although I have super-duper sticky tyres my car does still slide about a bit. This is exacerbated by the fact that the roads now have two clear tracks worn away by the constant friction of traffic. On side roads these aren't quite as clear as on the main roads, and sometimes have a very interesting corrugated texture where a heavy vehicle has created tyre tracks that have then frozen into place - it's rather like going over an extended cattle grid - and then been covered by more layers of snow and ice. No matter what the road, it means that there are natural tracks that your wheels follow unless you accelerate and turn more sharply than is recommended given the friction problems. Curiously, I feel that I have less control through the power steering than I had with manual steering - I suspect that this is because I'm getting less feedback through the steering wheel than I'm used to.
These are the reasons to be terrified; the reason to downgrade that terror to mere extreme anxiety is that there has now been enough snow that the snowploughs have created walls of swept snow and ice along both sides of each carriageway. On the road uphill this is now a reassuring foot or so high, forming wall between the road and the gorge beyond. Admittedly it would probably only act as a launch ramp for anyone driving at the 50 km/h speed limit, but as I'm sufficiently anxious that 40 km/h is a rarity and 30 km/h far more common, it's enough to stop me if anything goes wrong. Not that people seem too interested in sticking to the speed limit or, for that matter, signalling their intentions to turn, but that's another story.
The big question here is still whether we'll have a white Christmas. Given the variability of the winter weather over the past few years it's still quite possible that we'll have a thaw and it'll clear up over the next two weeks. Still, I think that the chances of Akureyri having a white Christmas are orders of magnitude above those of Liverpool having one.
This isn't a sensible maximum; rather it is the minimum amount where I only feel anxious rather than terrified by the drive from the shopping centre to the university. First, the road winds uphill beside the gorge through which the river Gléra heads down to meet the fjord. I use the term gorge deliberately as it's one of those steep-sided clefts with a narrow but icy river at the bottom. As is common here there are no crash barriers to stop you going off the road into the gorge should you lose control of your vehicle for some reason.
Secondly, although I have super-duper sticky tyres my car does still slide about a bit. This is exacerbated by the fact that the roads now have two clear tracks worn away by the constant friction of traffic. On side roads these aren't quite as clear as on the main roads, and sometimes have a very interesting corrugated texture where a heavy vehicle has created tyre tracks that have then frozen into place - it's rather like going over an extended cattle grid - and then been covered by more layers of snow and ice. No matter what the road, it means that there are natural tracks that your wheels follow unless you accelerate and turn more sharply than is recommended given the friction problems. Curiously, I feel that I have less control through the power steering than I had with manual steering - I suspect that this is because I'm getting less feedback through the steering wheel than I'm used to.
These are the reasons to be terrified; the reason to downgrade that terror to mere extreme anxiety is that there has now been enough snow that the snowploughs have created walls of swept snow and ice along both sides of each carriageway. On the road uphill this is now a reassuring foot or so high, forming wall between the road and the gorge beyond. Admittedly it would probably only act as a launch ramp for anyone driving at the 50 km/h speed limit, but as I'm sufficiently anxious that 40 km/h is a rarity and 30 km/h far more common, it's enough to stop me if anything goes wrong. Not that people seem too interested in sticking to the speed limit or, for that matter, signalling their intentions to turn, but that's another story.
The big question here is still whether we'll have a white Christmas. Given the variability of the winter weather over the past few years it's still quite possible that we'll have a thaw and it'll clear up over the next two weeks. Still, I think that the chances of Akureyri having a white Christmas are orders of magnitude above those of Liverpool having one.