The Benefits of Being Prepared

"Wait a second," you're probably thinking. "There was already a blog post about snow in the countryside!" Yes, but these photos are different! "No they're not! They look exactly the same!" Really, they are! Look closely.
I don't mean to repeat myself with these entries, but yesterday there was a pretty decent snowstorm here where I live, and I couldn't resist taking more pictures of some of my favorite locations. Even if the photo compositions are identical, I feel the lighting and weather conditions are different enough to create a brand new subject!
Not surprisingly, my hard drive is full of photos of the same spots. Over the course of a year, it's been fun to document how the rotating seasons and different times of day can change the way familiar places look and feel. At some point, I want to collect all of my favorite photos of said locations and put them all into one blog post, so we can see just how dramatic those changes are.

Anyway... So there was a snowstorm yesterday. Big, fat wet heavy flakes. I was going home late in the evening by bus, and while keeping an eye out for my stop I was having trouble recognizing where I was, due to everything outside the bus window being a blur of white. When the bus stopped around the time I would usually be getting off, I took another peak outside and had no clue where I was. I asked the bus driver if this was my stop, and he said yup, and I looked again and I asked again and he still said yup. So I got off.
There were other passengers who had disembarked and were walking toward what looked like a town in the distance, and since I was still unsure as to where I was I just followed them. From what I could gather, the winding narrow road to my usual bus stop was probably too treacherous for the driver due to the weather, and he instead opted to dump us off on the side of the freeway. The walk was beautiful, despite the cold and my inappropriate footwear (thin high-tops). There was no moon out, but the reflection from the street lamps off the fresh snow made everything glow. Eventually I did get home, albeit with numb toes.
The next morning I headed to work wearing my steel-toed boots, as I didn't want my poor feet to freeze again. However, after one step outside I immediately turned back: the wet snow had frozen over night, and the road leading down to my school was a literal slippery slope of ice and death (maybe not death). I needed equipment if I was to survive the walk without bruising my bottom, so I went rummaging for my shoe spikes (leftovers from a mountain hiking trip I took a few years back).
Some people might consider it overkill, lacing up heavy boots and strapping on ice spikes for a 10 minute walk. But as I descended down the hill at a comfortable pace, bottom un-bruised, I couldn't help but feel a tiny bit smug whenever I noticed a high school student in sneakers struggling behind me to safely shuffle across the icy roads.