The Oh Waily kids and I made the trip up to see the Oh Waily grandparents yesterday.  This involves us driving the Desert Road and due to the colder weather we played “guess the temperature”.  After managing to drive through last year and the car’s external temperature gauge registering a -1ºC, this has become something of a regular game.  Not to mention the fact that Miss Oh Waily was desperate to play in snow.

Well, we didn’t get to play in snow but there was plenty of leftover crunchy ice on the roadside.  Could I drive by it?  Could I heck.  I was regaled with, “Mum, can you pull over?  Pleeeaassee ?!?!”, not once but multiple times.  Apparently me trying to find a safe space to do the actual pulling over was just too much waiting time.

Eventually I found a good spot and out we got.  It gave me a nice view of Mount Ngauruhoe looking anything but the unfriendly Mount Doom.

Then Miss Oh fossicked around on the ice/snow patches and found really interesting icicles that she picked up.  If you know how these are formed, I’d love to hear about it.  They seem to be full of bubbles when I look close up at the original photograph and also seem to form in straight lines.  Quite interesting really.

For the record, the lowest external temperature that the car registered was 2ºC.  And the most fun thing we saw, but couldn’t photograph, were large icicles dropping from the roadside overhangs on the really windy bits.  They looked like a frozen waterfall dropping over the side of the road.  Quite spectacular on a small scale.