It gets cold here

Two things I forgot about PEI while I was away:
1. It's windy. Islands are generally windy, but PEI is especially windy. I mean, there was often a breeze on Skye, and the winds did pick up some fierce by times, but nothing like here. There's always at least a slight wind here, and more often than not it's strong enough. And it makes it cold. Which brings me to point number...
2. It gets cold here. Being away for last winter, I haven't really experienced cold weather since the end of the winter of 2004-2005. So sometime in April or May of 2005 - one-and-a-half years ago. Canada is a cold country, it just doesn't seem quite so bad once you get used to it, I guess.

Environment Canada is predicting the coldest winter for 15 years. I'll be in Scotland.

It snowed again, starting Friday night and all through Saturday. As always, the snow at least makes it feel less cold - sucks some of the moisture out of the air, or something, I'm not sure how it works exactly but it does. The roads got slippy, apparently (I wasn't out after Friday evening so heard second-hand) and the plows were out on the road. The snow was pretty wet when I took this picture:but after it all came down, the temperature dropped and the snow was cold enough that you could pick it up and make snowballs (I tossed a few at some trees when I went wandering around yesterday evening).

This morning this is what it looked like with all the snow down:

Wyatt and I took Ben sledding down the road to Henry's Pit, an old shale quarry of sorts in the front yard of a neighbour's former farm (named for the late Henry, who was never alive in my lifetime but his widow lived in the house until some years ago). I can't remember the last time I went sledding there, or at all - probably over 10 years ago. Since the cows haven't been out eating on the hills for a few years, there was weeds all over the place that weren't there back when we used to go there as kids, but we managed to make a track of sorts and sent Ben down on the GT. He wanted to use it, not the basic sled, since the GT has a steering wheel I imagine.
Ben told us quite a few times that it was fun, and he even enjoyed the "crashing" (hitting the weeds on occasion) although he had trouble describing what he did: "slid...snow" until I taught him how to say "I went sledding" ("I wen sweddin"). Wyatt wore himself out carrying Ben and the sled back up the hill; I carried the sled and made Ben walk up on his own, guiding him from behind by pushing on his back. The kid's got to get some exercise out of it, I figure (it builds character).

I'm heading back to the UK on a flight tonight from Halifax, so it was cool that I got to experience some snow before I went back.