What strange weather we’re having!

It’s supposed to be spring, isn’t it?  The past few days have been more wintry than most of our winter has been!

A couple of days ago, hubby and I took our two dogs for a walk around Fountains Abbey and the Studley Royal Water Gardens, which is a World Heritage site about 20 minutes drive from our house.

Click here for the National Trust page about the Abbey and Gardens

We probably visit there around once a month as it’s a National Trust property as well and as members we get in for free as part of our membership. It was a lovely sunny, if somewhat chilly, morning when we arrived and we’d planned to have lunch at the café by the lake after our walk. They make some very mean paninis there, our favourite having a filling of mushrooms and melted blue cheese. Washing one of those down with a cappucino would have set me up for the afternoon. “Would have” being the operative words. After walking up through the Water Gardens, around the Abbey ruins and heading back through the Gardens again, we were visited by a hailstorm. We experienced two more before reaching the lakeside car park again. Having the dogs with us meant we would have had to sit at one of the outside tables, which was no longer an option due to the inclement turn in the weather. The temperature reading on the dashboard thermometer was 1.5 degrees Celsius at one point on our journey home.

Yesterday, I was working about 45 minutes drive away from home, listening to Rumours and Recklessness by Nicole Clarkston on my iPod via the car stereo during my journey. This took me up and over the wonderfully named Blubberhouses Moor which looked quite lovely in the morning sunshine. Coming home was a totally different matter, though. Not long after I’d left the pharmacy I’d spent my working day at, I could see that there was some sort of “weather event” happening up on the Moor. Even before I started the climb up, it had started snowing and this soon turned into a full blown blizzard. As you can see in the photo, the temperature had dropped to 0 degrees Celsius!