"The Worst Winter Storm In X Years..."

When we woke up it had been snowing. Not only that, it was still snowing. As best as we could judge a good couple of inches had fallen overnight and it was still coming down pretty heavily. This had potential to complicate matters, but for the most part just looked really cool.

Friend P had told us that we just had to go to Wegman's for breakfast. Wegman's is a big supermarket chain. The store opposite our hotel compared to a Tesco's Extra or a big Sainsbury's. And it had a caf�. And a coffee bar. Behind the coffee bar was this sign:

I got a bollocking for taking that photo. Apparently Wegman's company policy is that no photos can be taken in the store. Well, fuck that. I already took it. Tough. While I don't myself agree with the sentiment on the sign, I knew that both Anne and Sham would. Hence the photo was taken purely for their benefit. Hence they are the ones Wegman's should have told off, LOL.

Unfortunately, Wegman's do not serve breakfast on weekdays. How shite is that? In Sainsbury's in Leamington you can get breakfast all day every day. I thought the USA was supposed to do everything bigger and better. Mind you, on that basis, Wegman's probably compares to a Spar, so I've probably got nothing to complain about. We settled for tea and coffee (guess who had what) and muffins. The muffins were good. I wasn't exactly sure they were what the little plastic signs on the trays we got them from said they were, but they were good all the same.

From the night before we now had a map of Ithaca, with lots of places marked on it that we needed to visit. As we set out towards the first we started to get the impression that the phrase "weather permitting" was going to get overused today.

We made it to Stewart Park, on the outskirts of the town. I'm sure it's a very impressive place, but the thing about parks is that they all look the same covered in snow. Just big white expanses. Granted, big white expanses look impressive in themselves, but you don't get as much of a sense of the place itself, only that it looks damn pretty when covered in snow.

Alison had a number of impromptu business meetings in the tourist office at Stewart Park, while I sat in the car with its rapidly falling ambient temperature. I couldn't exactly see it, because pretty soon all the car windows were delicately laced with snow, but I could hear the snow-plough at work in the parking lot. It was a pick-up truck, with a slightly wonky bulldozery attachment at the front, and the way it sounded like it was driving was quite interesting. I wouldn't have had the first idea of how to drive a snow-plough, but by listening I got to the point where I could hazard a guess. Basically, you choose the stretch of snow that you're going to plough, back up so you've got a really good run up, then put your foot down and keep going until the weight of the snow you're ploughing brings you to a standstill. I realise this is not the same approach adopted by the heavy-duty purpose-built snowploughs they use to clear the major streets, but that's not the same thing.

After Stewart Park there were a number of things we wanted to look at up on the Cornell Campus. Yes, I do mean the Cornell. It's on a hill towards the edge of Ithaca, and is a major contributor to the town's demographic. Ithaca is in the midst of what people would normally term Small Town America(TM), but Ithaca itself doesn't really fit into this bracket. It's more of a Cambridge type town, where the University's students and alumni form a large portion of the local population. There is still apparently the whole Town and Gown thing going on.

There was a problem. I mentioned how it was snowing, right? And I mentioned that Cornell was on a hill, right? Most of the roads still hadn't been cleared yet. The road that went up the hill was amongst those roads. It was at this point that I discovered automatics are shit for driving in the snow. Luckily you do have some manually selectable gears, otherwise we'd have been buggered. There was a taxi halfway up the hill whose driver clearly did not understand about manually selectable gears, and how they can help with things like driving uphill in the snow. However, soon after passing the taxi I decided that the roads were a little too treacherous for my liking, and we turned around and headed back.

We stopped at the bottom of the hill and went and looked at Ithaca Falls. I've never seen a frozen waterfall before. Impressive isn't the word. Wow goes some way towards describing it, but still doesn't cover it. I think it was made more amazing by the fact that it wasn't entirely frozen. There was a small section where the water was still thundering down the rockface, and this served as an excellent contrast, demonstrating the sort of power that had been imprisoned by ice across the rest of the waterfall. I took pictures, but they didn't really capture the full effect. The snowfall dulled the images, more so because the background was mostly snow and ice too.

On return to downtown Ithaca we parked the car up so that we could wander around and see all the places in the vicinity that we wanted/needed to. Our first stop was an establishment called Gimme. This was a coffee bar. It has the impression of being run by people whose dream it was to open a coffee bar serving the sort of coffee that some people only dream about. It had come with a strong recommendation from everyone in Ithaca we had met (ie, Mom L, her family, and Friend P), and it seemed these recommendations were well deserved. Alison liked the coffee, and I liked the tea. All their own blends. MMM-MMM :-) Pinned up inside was a printout of the Gulf Wars: Episode II poster that's doing the rounds on the internet at the moment. This was just one of the many many indicators we saw in Ithaca to suggest that the anti-War sentiment there was a lot closer to the surface than it was in New York. I now have a soft-copy of said poster, people who haven't yet seen it and who ask nicely may get sent it if they're lucky.

We passed this store, with it's rather disturbing name:

We were also taking photos of churches. This may sound odd, but it wasn't, really. To Alison churches are potential concert venues for groups that travel with her company. It was also in this work-related vein that we got a tour around the Holiday Inn. I really felt like an interloper at this point. Alison was there talking to the Sales Rep, and I was sat there doing nothing, but the Sales Rep was talking to both of us. It seemed odd, but I could understand Alison not wanting to explain the full situation. I don't think she'd have objected if I joined in, either.

The Holiday Inn had a pool, and we saw it. I only mention this because it seemed really odd, knowing what the weather was like outside and then seeing the pool inside. It was a contrast that for some reason was far stranger than any other of the many inside/outside constrasts we encountered throughout the whole of the trip. The gym in the hotel was just... intimidating :-)

We then went to seek out Friend P and Mom L. They both had offices just outside the town centre, and as it turned out, it was Friend P whose office we came to first. She was still there, waiting for us. Mom L, we were told, had gone home to fetch her daughter and then decided that due to the weather conditions she wasn't coming back in. The thing was this. Although Ithaca is well-prepared for such weather, there's only so much you can do while the snow is still coming down. Downtown all the roads were passable, but outside the town there were going to be problems more or less until the snow eased. By now Alison and I were starting to realise that there was a fair chance that we wouldn't be getting out of Ithaca tomorrow, or that our flight would be cancelled due to the weather. You see, as everyone reading this will know by now, it wasn't just snowing heavily in Ithaca, it was snowing heavily down the whole of the Eastern Seaboard. Most airports were closed. According to Friend P's internet connection, JFK airport was open, but neither she nor Alison nor myself were convinced of the accuracy of this information.

We had lunch with Friend P in a restaurant she described as "the best Mexican in town, but I'm biased since it's owned by a bunch of my friends". I've had an awful lot of Mexican food in recent years, and it's safe to say that it was damn good. An added surprise was that we were given a Stranded in Ithaca discount off our meal. Friend P had told her friends where we were from (like they hadn't already guessed) and that we weren't expecting to get home tomorrow as planned. I think everyone in the restaurant was getting a discount because of the weather, but that's not the point :-) We chatted more about the political situation, about 9-11, and of course about Ithaca (particularly its options with regards to our evening meal). Friend P was very cool, and hopefully we'll keep in touch with her. She was also sensible enough to stop insisting that she paid for the meal when Alison pointed out that the company should pay for it. Heh.

We said goodbye to Friend P at that point and headed back into the centre of downtown Ithaca to explore the shopping area. Many stores were beginning to close early. Though most signs up in store windows to say that they were closed were of the sensible variety, we saw one that said "Closed at 1pm. Gone Skiing :)", and another that said "[this store] closed at 3pm due to shitty weather". Alison bought a new bag. A funky Levi's corduroy bag. I bought some new underwear, because I can't count, and some new hankies, because when you have a bad cold while you're on holiday, sooner or later you run out of hankies. I also finally succombed to buying some Lego in a toy store. It wasn't the set I wanted, but it was a collection of smaller Star Wars Lego sets that I kinda wanted and figured I'd buy if I wasn't going to get the set. The sets in question were the ones that make up Jabba's Palace. Yup, got a Lego Jabba the Hutt :-)

There was possibly a lot more we could've done, for instance there was a comic shop I wanted to visit in my hunt for a copy of Green Lantern #155. But there's only so much you can trudge around in the snow for, however picturesque it is. Both of us wanted to be warm. We headed back to the motel, and started making preparations for our possibly abortive journey home. Alison also wrote up some of her expenses, and some of her report on the trip for work. I built the two smaller Lego sets and typed up some of this. Alison found an old episode of Friends with a hilarious line from Joey in it about transmission fluid that had me in fits of giggles, even though I must've seen the episode four or five years ago or something stupid like that.

Then we headed out again, for the last time *sniff*. Friend P had recommended a restaurant called Madeline's. Once again, the recommendation was a deserved one. The food was excellent, especially the yummy raspberry dessert I had (which was chosen at the waitress's recommendation). As we wandered around Ithaca afterwards, I decided to sully the hitherto untouched snow that had fallen on a mini-adventure playground in the shopping precinct. We also took some photos of the place, which gave the unexpected bonus of capturing the snow wonderfully. It made perfect sense afterwards, but we weren't expecting the flash to catch the snow like that.

We headed back to the motel, and to bed, wondering if this was going to be our last night in the US, as planned, or if things were going to get complicated (in a way that would mean nothing to Avril Lavigne).