Winter Wonderland

We saw so much snow driving from Laura's to the airport. It makes everything look so clean and beautiful. This picture was taken just a few minutes down the road from Laura's house. 

Not really sure what this is... it's some sort of big rock mountain on the way to Denver! But we thought it looked pretty cool.

We had one last very quick stop at the outlets because I was over charged for something so we ran in and fixed that up... as well as getting a few last bargains from Carters. But we didn't have much time so we had to rush...

... and luckily we did because the roads were getting quite bad because of all the snow. We also took a wrong turn heading into Denver and got a little lost. We both stayed pretty calm, but we knew that inside we were both getting pretty worried. It was hard to see where the hell we were in all the snow, but somehow we managed to get back on the right track. Mick did a great job driving in all the snow, as it was a little scary!

We were very lucky to have the hire car shuttle bus waiting for us as soon as we arrived because it was freezing, about -12˚C and it's still another 10 minutes to the airport from the hire car drop off area. (Which is huge by the way - goes for miles and miles, just full of rent-a-cars). It was also really good because he dropped us off straight in front of 'kerb-side check-in', where there was no line up. Obviously because it is freezing!! But it was good for us because we didn;t have to carry our bags and we checked straight in, thinking we made it with just a bit of spare time. When in fact we only just had enough time. It was quite a walk down to security, where you have to take off all shoes and coats and they test your drink bottles. We then had to get on the train and go to our gate... took the kids to the toilet and grabbed a slice of the best tasting pizza ever.... which we had to force down while walking to the gate where we were the only ones left to board!! We only just made it, but knew we had to get something to eat, because we were all so hungry!!! What a rush!

We actually had to chuck the last bit of our pizza because we had to board, which turned out to be kinda annoying because once we got on the plane and the doors were locked we saw a guy rip out a pizza box.... apparently they let you eat hot food on there.... but I guess that shouldn't have surprised us!!! I'm still thinking about that good bit of pizza though!! Anyway, so the plane didn't take off for another 40 minutes because outside it looked like this...

And when it looks like this the planes have to be 'de-iced', which takes 10 minutes, once its' your turn.... if you look closely you can see a plane getting de-iced... a guy on a crane sprays stuff (not sure what) all over the plane!

It was quite interesting, but made the plane ride quite long! We were so glad that we weren't flying out of LA today to London, because other wise it may have been a bit stressful!! And good to know that we did the right thing in heading out of Denver a day earlier - in case of a snow storm, like this!!

A hell of a lot of work goes into getting the planes of the ground at this airport anyway, there were big snow scrappers and snow crushers and all sorts of stuff going on. Its amazing seeing some of the things that go on in other parts of the world!