Cold.

snow in rennes.

Oh, it was cold last week. Oslo and Lillehammer were colder but they have an excuse, being in Norway. Rennes has no excuse for a week straight where each evening goes below -4. The days were clear as, well, day (a metaphor with limited currency in Rennes, generally speaking), though that's not much consolation riding the bus into work at 9:30am seeing seagulls standing - standing, mind you - on the Vilaine. The Vilaine's a canal, a watery passage. They were standing on it, you see. On their little feet. I can't stress that enough.

I was probably fortunate to miss the teeth of this weather. I was riding out to Vezin the weekend before it really started up, and got a puncture just outside of town. The 6km walk home was a kind of advance I guess, since the week it took me to go and buy a patch kit spared me some chills riding past those crazy seagulls.

The whole sordid episode culminated on Saturday. I'd been watching my little weather forecasts all week: a little line of alternating "sunny and cold" and "clear and cold", terminating in a little snowflake on Saturday. Sure enough, I woke up Saturday morning to a nice cover of about a centimetre of snow, which thickened to a good two inches during the day.

Blithely I trotted down to a bus stop and headed out to Chantepie to buy a patch kit and replacement inner tube for my bike, only to find that the return leg would be by foot, as the buses had stopped for the snow. But for the lack of a limping bike and the added company of 2 inches of powder, fairly familiar.