This year has been a bad year for snow in Tajikistan and so we've only gone sledding once, up at the ski resort. This past week it snowed three or four inches on Monday. And then Friday night, without much warning, it snowed again. We didn't get much here in Dushanbe (it was mostly rain which is fine with me), but I knew that there would be a lot of snow in the mountains. Time to go sledding.
The only problem was that there was a high level visitor in town and Brandon had to be a note-taker at several meetings. I asked him if we could squeeze in a quick trip before his meetings, but he said that he didn't want to get stuck and then explain to everyone why he wasn't there for the meetings. Jobs can get really tiresome sometimes, especially when they happen on the first snowy Saturday of the year.
But, in a completely uncharacteristic twist, he told us that we were free to go without him. I was pretty shocked, but took him up on the offer.
When we made it to our hill, the snow was perfectly pristine with four or five inches of fresh powder on top of the snow that had fallen earlier this week. I'm not a big winter fan, but I do love going up in the mountains for some beautiful fresh snow on a clear, mostly sunny day.
After two and a half hours of sledding, the snow was nothing like pristine, but the sled runs had gotten nicely packed down and pretty dang fast. We brought up a half-gallon of hot herbal tea (the former Soviet Union is getting to us) and everyone enjoyed sledding and drinking tea and sledding some more. William, in characteristic baby fashion, wanted absolutely nothing to do with that weird cold white stuff and stayed on my lap or strapped to my front the entire time.
I'm hoping that we can get a few more sledding Saturdays in before winter comes to an end, and next time Brandon will be able to come along. Fingers crossed!