Snowing on the M1–A lot.

Yesterday we drove down from our lovely cottage in the Peak district to see our friends in Essex one last time.  We visited Cambridge on the way which will be  a different blog.  We spent the night in Rayleigh seeing our nurses and vets  from our time in Southend.  We had a great catch up and it was sad to say goodbye to everyone.  Hopefully we will see some of them next year on their Australian travels.

Today we started driving north again and stopped in at Sophie’s parents house to visit her.  Sophie has 2-3 bulging intervertebral discs in her lower back and is now a recumbent invalid.  Once again it was brilliant to see her and chat and talk about hopefully seeing her next year back in Australia.  She was looking pretty good for someone that has been in bed for 3 weeks and probably at least another 3 weeks.

While we were at Sophie's it started snowing a bit so we set off at 1pm for our 3hr 20min drive north.  As we drove out to meet up with the M1 – one of the major motorways in the UK, we noticed that the snow was getting heavier and the road was getting whiter. 

Soon we were driving at mind breakingly slow speeds and watching morons test their brakes by sliding down the road sideways.  We finally made it to the M1, a 4-6 lane highway, and i had predicted that there would be minimal snow on the road.  I am happy to admit that i was very very wrong.

Below are some pics and video of our 5 hour adventure.  The snow actually did end after a while when we suddenly broke out of the snow clouds but there was a lot of driving through thick snow with no lanes or anything.  luckily everyone drives so slowly and cautiously that we were able to forge ahead and win a race that may not have even been occurring.  As long as you keep a large space in front of you and anything else the problems are minimal as really it is the braking that causes all the problems.

The M1 is the big blue road travelling north.  We made a quick stop at KFC so we would die with a full belly of chicken if it was going to happen.

Snowy snowy snow snow