Winter in Scotland

When we landed at Aberdeen Airport Dyce on 12 January 2013, it was the first time the boys and I had been to Scotland. My husband had been commuting all through 2012 and had been to Aberdeen every second week after the summer holidays, but for the rest of us it was a new and exciting experience.

A small car and lots of luggage

After we got our luggage, we went to get our rental car. It turned out there had been a mix-up and we got a small car instead of a station wagon. This was a Saturday, so the people with the right level of authority were not present and apparently nothing could be done. The car was too small to take all of us and our luggage, so my husband took the car and most of our luggage, while the boys and I followed by taxi. Luckily it was only a 15 minute drive to our new home in Westhill, a garden suburb to Aberdeen.

A cold welcome

The house was as expected, but it was very cold. The outside temperature wasn't more than a few degrees below zero, but the house was constantly cold for at least the first 5-6 weeks. For a while we thought there might be something wrong with the radiators, as we had turned all of them up to their maximum but it was still cold. We had to wear slippers or woollen socks and thermal clothes inside. I also bought a couple of extra blankets we could use in the living room. 

After a while we discovered that a lot of heat was lost through our mailbox. Our mailbox only had a flap on the outside of the door, so the mailbox contributed quite a bit to the heat loss. When we started closing the doors to the kitchen, living room and dining room , the heat loss was limited to the hall and the temperature in the other rooms became much more comfortable. I later noticed that the boys' piano teacher had a mailbox with two flaps, one on the inside and one on the outside of the door. Her house was not as cold as ours.

"Adverse weather procedures"

There was very little snow when we arrived in Westhill and as it turned out there would not be much snow all winter. Most of the time the snowfalls were extremely light, but on a couple of occasions we had 5-10 cm snow during the night. The result was chaos on the roads, as the Scots are not very used to snow.

On one of these occasions the school was closed for two days, due to "adverse weather". We had been warned when the boys started school that we would have to listen to the radio and call a special number if there was snow during the night. By entering the correct pin code we would receive a message from the head teacher, informing us whether the school was closed. or not This was the "Adverse weather procedure". As Norwegians we are used to regular snowfalls, so this was an exotic experience.

Green winter

With very little snow, there were not many opportunities for the winter activities we are used to. The boys went tobogganing less than 10 times all winter and skiing was never an option in our neighborhood.

Having very little snow was good for us adults though. Our hire car came with summer tires, winter tires was not included. My husband drove to work on summer tires and managed to stay on the road through the few days where there was a little snow on the road, though I heard on the news that a lot of others weren't quite as lucky.

The challenge of driving on snow with summer tires

One snowy day I decided to take the car to go shopping. I spent an hour getting out of the driveway!  There are two main reasons for this:
1. I'm not very good at driving on snow (actually, I was pretty crap, as it turned out). The wheels started spinning on the slippery surface almost immediately after my foot touched the gas pedal.
2. There was no shovel or spade in our house, I only had a broom to get rid of the snow around the car. That was NOT particularly efficient.

After almost an hour I was still struggling and had taken my coat off because I was hot and rather embarrassed at my hopeless driving. Fortunately a couple of neighbors took pity on me and helped me push the car onto the road, where there was hardly any snow at all. When I left our street and got onto the main road it had been salted and there was no snow, as expected.

By the time I got home our friendly neighbors had removed all the snow in our driveway too, so parking the car was no problem at all.