New Year, New Snow!

The first full year of Banceithin Life has come to an end. Work on site made way for celebrating and partying with friends and family, so there’s been little progress over the last two weeks, but looking back at the blog is a reminder of just how far the place has come in a year and all those lovely people who’ve helped us along the way. Living in and around the building work means you tend to forget the big changes that have taken place, all you can see are the myriad of smaller jobs still to do that seem to take forever, but the cottage has gone from this…

to this ….  

… and the barn from this…

… to this…

We’re only 2 days in to 2010 and already there’s been much excitement – it started with a classic conga dance around the kitchen island and some serious booty shaking until the early hours, and for those party-goers who managed to get out of bed the next day (while others slept off the sloe gin, snowball, elderberry wine and prosecco cocktail), there was a spot of bird watching at the new year’s day red kite feeding frenzy.

And then the snow began to fall.

By morning we had a good few inches and Banceithin was a winter wonderland, which was fun for Stevie but not so fun for our new year guests in their city cars who had to get back to civilisation and real jobs that pay real money.

 

The convoy of intrepid travellers led by Dave in the truck successfully negotiated the snowy drive, but events took a turn for the worse as we wended our way up the lane. Car one made it half-way up the hill, car two got stuck behind car one and car three was teetering on the edge of the ditch doing some impressive wheel spinning. After one and half hours, a bag of dishwasher salt, two shovels, a failed truck tow, a dented front, a successful tractor tow and a huge collective sigh of relief, all three cars made it out to the main road. Getting stuck in the snow is a great way to meet the neighbours though – we now know that Terry lives in Talwrn Lodge up the road and has a new borehole, that Nigel thinks this is the worst winter we’ve had for years and that the farmer with the indecipherable Welsh name and his identikit son have a big Massey Ferguson that can pull cars out of ditches. I also now know that Welsh men prefer to stand in a huddle with arms folded and discuss the relative merits of tractors versus trucks whilst the womenfolk shovel snow and tie tow ropes to cars.