Ice Skating on a Frozen Canal - Holland

WTH, video did not get posted with my last post, second try:

:voc:

Like I said, i moved from Texas to the St.Lawrence valley when I was 11, the winters lasted 5 months back then. Talk about a radical change. I know what you mean about the sugar coated part, shoot we had drifts over 20 ft high in the late 70's. Talk about your Normal Rockwell Christmases. The first winter I was there it snowed 25 inches overnight on Christmas eve. I got introduced to a snow shovel by my father and some simple instructions. "dig the car out"/ About the time i got the drive way pretty much shoveled the snowplow went by and filled the end of the drive way with snow , taking out our mailbox in the deal too. That was back during the Carter years and the oil embargo, we had three wood stoves in the house. I started to think my name was "get wood". By the time I was a young teen we were making really good money for kids cutting and splitting firewood and selling it. All you needed was a 14 horse snow machine to drag the logs and a good chain saw and some gumption.
We would split when it was below or near zero, the wood would just split so much easier than when it was warm.

Very nice! I saw that one before. City skating looks really fun.


Here was last year, also a good skating year - nice views of lovely Delft in the background:

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Here was 2009 on the canals around here - that was a great year for long-distance skating (cheap cell phone camera though):

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What I don't understand is how you get the snow off of all of that ice.Could you explain that for me? I remember having a hell of time just getting an area big enough to play a little hockey on, about 1/6th the size of hockey rink. We used snow blowers and pusher shovels, but once the snow got up to about 3-4 feet deep not even that was easy.

We used to do that with snowmobiles on the river behind my house after a thaw and then it refroze. The ice would be so smooth it would be hast to get the machine going so we started putting screws in the track to get traction on the ice. I've done 50mph on hockey skates before they came out from under me.

Here is a nice one from yesterday, it appears in Rotterdam - typical Dutch landscape with the windmill and love that sun setting:

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Very Nice! Thanks