Getting Used to Midwest Winters

When they have winters in Missouri, they don't mess about. I've recently moved to St Louis, to marry my American spouse, and trust me, the winters I'm used to are pretty mild in comparison. Our newspapers are usually panicking as soon as we get a few flakes of snow. Half an inch of snowfall is considered a 'blizzard'. Ourt trains become irregular in autumn (whoops, sorry, the Fall) due to leaves on the track, let alone run problem-free in winter.

I've been here before in the winter, but it's been a few years, so I blithely arrived in O'Hare airport on the 1st Dec, to find out my flight had been canceled. Freezing rain was battering the runways outside, and not an awful lot was getting off the ground. Eventually they found me a later flight, and we boarded. We then got off again, because it was too cold to take off. An hour later, we boarded again, and sat on the plane for over another hour while the de-icing vehicles were deployed to coat the plane with whatever it is they coat planes with in cold weather. Half an hour of coating later, it was realized whatever was being sprayed was having no effect. They determined this was due to something with the truck doing the de-icing, and another truck was called for. We eventually got into St Louis about four hours late, and I considered myself lucky to get there at all. Don't ask why my two suitcases took a further forty eight hours to arrive, mind.

Surprisingly, the weather seemed very localized; Chicago was paralyzed, St Louis dry and actually pretty mild, probably milder than it was in England. I unpacked, spend a few days reacquainting myself with my fiancee and cats, got married, and then we headed down on the train to Kansas City to visit my new in laws. And again, I had the luck to get there just as the winter storms were approaching. I forget the exact temperature, as I'm still getting used to converting from Celsius to Farenheit, but it was cold. Cold enough to severely worry any brass monkeys in the vicinity. And, surprisingly, this meant the return train was canceled. Not due to leaves on the track, but trees on the track, following their trunks snapping in the extreme cold. Again, things are running the next day, and we finally get home several hours late. Again, the weather in St Louis is fairly mild, with no hint of the problems further west.

That was about my traveling done for the month, so naturally, the bad weather decided to at last come here. I'm looking out of my living room window at the four or five inches of snow covering the park; the roads are now clear, after twenty four hours or so of chaos (driving down the highway at anything more than 15-20mph was essentially suicidal, as numerous vehicles in ditches attested to). The funny thing is, I'm told this probably won't be the worst of it.

I'm not feeling homesick or anything at the moment, I must say. But I did enjoy the time when my winter crises tended to be minor.