Snow modesty

    I have seen snow once from New York ten years back but Divya and Niya had never seen snow yet. Hence, watching snow while living in the US was on our mind. Intention was just to see snow atleast once. So when the freeze warning led to further research at weather.com, we saw an opportunity at BrassTown Bald, about two hours from here.
    There was an earlier snow prediction in Dahlonega, a month or so back, we had drove there and came back snowless. This trip was also done against such anticipation. But we did see some positive signs before the trip.
    The leather jacket we had bought from India for Divya had torn and so we bought another one and as we parked our car back at home, the lamp post was showering slight dandruff-like flurries. Unaware of driving risks in case of snow, I decided to get the pending can't repair tyre replaced. This time, Nissan pulled out an L-shaper from the tyre and said that no replacement was needed.That was a 170$ saving.

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We timed our trip around 9 AM this saturday as the predicted snow time was 12 PM. We bought doughnuts for breakfast and one hour into the drive, we started seeing snow in the trees on both sides of the road. Divya was the one who pointed out the white-flower like snow interspersed in the green pine trees.



Doubts melted quickly as snow started presenting itself more and more in the grass, on the trees, on roofs , on cars. Steering felt like hand-cuffs as I could not take my hands off it to use my camera.My mind wandered through the snow sights where as I was forced to follow the road.
     






Essentially, the sights were patterns that snow made emphasizing the structure of what snow has fallen on - remember some interesting patterns on tree branches. At a point, the sights started getting boring. After all, it is just whiteness. The whiteness was not rich enough either.  Road curves sprang up snow covered hills once in a while and these looked beautiful enough to inspire photography at red lights.
      Meanwhile it snowed as well and we saw live snow coming in to our windshields - not a whole lot, just enough to have us claim that we have seen live snow but not enough for us to say 'Wow!'We were tempted to off-road and take in the immediate sights around but we kept on and finally reached BrassTown visitors center.
       Here, snow was thickest of what we had seen so far.As Divya helped Niya into multiple jackets, I  did some documentation photography. Now, we were pretty clear that the trip had paid off. Niya and Divya started playing with the snow on the grass.





We felt elated at this point and captured some of our happiness in photographs. The road to the top of the mountain was closed off.
   











As per weather predictions, the chance for snow was maximum at a different pin code, the brasstown valley. So we drove there and true to prediction, we experienced more live snow but there was no snow cover around. We however got lucky to get an excellent view of a thickly snow covered hill, though at a distance.
     





We reached back to the BrassTown visitors center and decided to spend the rest of the time there. More people had played in the snow by then. There was less snow left. Enthusiastic american families were playing around in the snow. The way they made huge snowballs was interesting,  grab some snow in your palms and form a ball the  size of shot-put, then roll the ball around, the snows stick together and you get a huge snow ball, the size of a foot ball, that forms the tummy and then another balls forms the trunk and another one the head, sticks become hands.
   






Niya was trying to join the party but had a hard time balancing herself in the slippery snow. She wanted to play with friends and make her own snowman. Meanwhile, the cold was biting my gloveless hands and I retired into the car heater.

Divya and Niya continued playing for some more time and Divya devised our own sweet little snow man.


       A little more enthusiasm would have helped but I had let the weather push me back into the car and soon back on the drive back. We would allow ourselves some time to take different sights on the road back. We started off with Vogel state park which was just another state park and we drove on. Well, we did get one more nice surprise in the form of icicles. They were an interesting sight.

     

The drive back was deliberately slow to reach in time for the second show. This allowed us to get into a very involved 'Anthakshari' - Niya was a very good audience as Divya and myself explored well known popular malayalam and hindi songs.








Soon we were off the snowy area and now the agenda was to watch our current favorite malayalam movie 'Annayum Rasoolum'. The movie was so effective that at the end of  the movie , we were not talking about our first tryst with snow but of our second tryst with the movie.