Christmas at the Cottage Part 1

Christmas at the Cottage

We have arrived at the freezing, although happily not frozen, cottage for a few days of winter fun!  Getting here and getting settled involved some serious resilience, but I’m sure we’re all better people for it.

Pippa and Donna trying to keep warm

I have to say that we were a bit smug when we bought our new, 2013 Toyota Highlander this past spring.  We really had no choice but to retire the 17 year-old, 430,000km wagon we had been driving for 13 years.  A 4 wheel drive vehicle seemed in order, I mean we really didn’t want to lug groceries, water, clothes, bedding etc. etc. up the laneway, over the hill, up the ramp and into the cottage, if we could avoid it.  The Highlander is equipped with all sorts of snow-defying gadgets.  It has this function that if you press and hold the brake pedal while on an incline it goes into this “pull me up” mode and crawls up the hill without the driver’s assistance.  It has the best snow tires that money can buy (well, now they’re the best after a major glitch which resulted in me having 3 flat tires--but that’s another story).  The list goes on.  However, what the Highlander does not have is 5-inches-of-crusty-ice-on-top-of-soft-snow defying gadgets.   Yes, the recent ice storm which wreaked havoc across Southern Ontario, and still has major areas without power, stopped us in our tracks at the foot of the laneway to the cottage.  So once again we were lugging!  Happily we didn’t have all that much to bring in.

Anne and Dermot join us in an attempt to keep warm

Once in the cottage we set about getting set up, turned on the power (no problem there--unlike in Toronto), Kate built a fire and the place began to thaw--SLOWLY... painfully SLOWLY.  We began to reminisce about the place we rented near Athens that was made of concrete and was absolutely FREEZING the whole time we were there.  We were laughing about the weiny little heaters that were running full blast and then would pop the breaker.  We remembered about John having to go outside to a post at the road to flip the breaker back on.  We outlined all the clothing that we wore to bed in an effort to keep warm and chalked it all up to the fact that the Greeks seemed to have the whole idea of keeping cool in the hot summer months down to a science, but keeping warm in the winter was a whole different ball game.  I guess there was a certain amount of smugness there too.  The one advantage to our trembling in the cottage over trembling in Athens, is that we knew the cottage would eventually get warm!  And it has!  I’m very cosy as I write this.

John hauling wood with plywood
covering the water hole!

Naturally we don’t have any running water while we are here but mountain man John has chopped a hole in the ice and is hauling water for our daily use.  He looks cute in his Austrian wooly-ear-flap hat and Swedish snow-shedding cargo pants and work gloves.