Now that you’ve read the title, let me inform you further – it was April. In California. So you can imagine, this was a pretty unprecedented situation. So unprecedented that we didn’t have a contingency plan.
What kind of a British secondary school goes on a trip to America? Thinking about it, it’s pretty rare. I’m sure not all schools do that. Mind you, I recall it being pretty expensive. But either way, my school took a bunch of us off to California. One of the highlights of the trip for me was going to Yosemite National Park, and staying overnight there in log cabins. Americans really know how to do National Parks. We’d just been staying in Los Angeles (height of culture, needless to say), and en route to San Francisco we were having a layover at America’s first national park. So off we go, happily pootling along down the road in our coach, when it starts to snow. Well, you should see Brits when it starts to snow; we were delighted. There was many a cheery remark and a joyful laugh at the white stuff serenely flaking from the sky. Makes a change from the grey drizzle that we’re so used to. As we drove, it seemed to be getting heavier. Odd, we thought. We were getting higher and higher up, too, and we noticed that the amount of snow accumulated at the side of the roads was steadily mounting as we drove. When the snow drifts at the sides of the roads were about half as high as the bus, I noticed the bus drivers looking a little worried. And still the snow fell. In fact, it was getting thicker.
When the snow drifts had reached the height of the bus, and the road was no longer so impressively cleared for us, we had to stop, and the two drivers and one of our teachers got out. We all craned eagerly to look out of the windows of the bus to see what they were up to. We were quite surprised to see one of the drivers emerge from the storage compartments of the bus with giant chains, and they grimly set to attaching them to the wheels. It looked like they were making a pretty good job of it, and we thought for a second we might be on our way again, but then it seemed as if the whole process had got held up somehow. One girl, who had the best vantage point of us, reported gleefully:
“It looks like Mr Fisher’s lost his wedding ring!”
Oh, the scandalous nature of it all. We watched as our teacher and the drivers scrabbled about in the snow looking for... well, a wedding ring in a blizzard.
We sighed, and sat back in our seats.
“Hey,” someone said, suddenly, “Are we still going to be staying in the national park? You know, with no heating or hot water, in the middle of a snow storm?”
We looked at each other doubtfully, and then out at the thick, steady fall of snow. There was silence.
“Surely not,” one person broke it with, doing a remarkably good impression of confidence.
The door to the bus burst open, and the drivers clambered quickly on board out of the cold, followed quickly by Mr Fisher, who was beaming triumphantly, the gold band glinting on his finger. Soon we were underway again, but the general atmosphere on the bus was a bit uneasy now. The drivers were obviously not happy about continuing in the worsening storm. Someone quietly asked Mr Fisher,
“Sir? Are we still staying in the log cabins?”
It’s incredible how teachers can do the bluff humour thing when they need to.
“Oh-ho, I don’t see why not,” he chuckled. We all gazed at each other in horror.
We continued to drive along, and I could hear muttering between the drivers and our teacher. Finally, enough was enough. We stopped in the middle of the road. There was a hasty conference between all the adults on the bus while the rest of us looked on, anxious not to be made to stay in subzero temperatures in log cabins.
“Everyone, I’m afraid the snow is too thick for us to drive any further, so we are now going to come back the way we came and stay the night at a hotel we passed not so long ago.”
There was a visible sigh of relief from the occupants of the bus. However, going backwards was easier said than done – the sides of the road were so heavily laden with snow that there really wasn’t room for a full size coach to turn around, so we reversed. Down a hill. In a blizzard. It was a tense journey.
But we finally pulled up outside the hotel, who coped remarkably well with the sudden arrival of fifty odd school kids who needed to be housed for the night. And a far more pleasant night we reckon we must have had too; warm, dry and holding impromptu room parties. I’m sure it was a logistical nightmare for the teachers, who on this occasion turned a firm blind eye and decided to start their responsibility duties again the next morning.
We made it up to Yosemite National Park the next day, when the storm had stopped and the snow was lying there innocently, as much as to say, “Who? Us? Cause trouble? Disrupt plans? Surely not.” As we drove through the park, the giant evergreen trees were layered in pure white, glinting in the sun that was starting to melt the blanket of snow that covered the streams, which were now gently meandering along. It was, without using too much of a cliché, a complete winter wonderland. I’d never seen such a beautiful place than this snow-drenched wilderness. It could have been the inspiration for a piece of art that sold for several million pounds, or a piece of music that would be popular for the next 500 years. I was a little disappointed that the Queen of Narnia didn’t rock up on her sleigh, furiously screeching about the thaw, but I’ll easily settle for what we got instead.