2009 sees another winter where the UK seemingly can’t cope.

For us, it started with an aborted attempt to spend the weekend in Brussels before Christmas. We were to take Herman on Le Shuttle and across through France and Belgium.

We got as far as Junction 8 on the M20 before Operation Stack kicked in and kept us there for several hours.

In this case, the snow had closed the ferry port in Dover (M20 feeds this) and in addition, the French weren’t letting trucks off the boats/shuttles onto their motorway system out of Calais.

Further, Eurostar’s trains encountered the wrong kind of snow and so Eurotunnel had to use Les Shuttles to rescue passengers.

The prospect of waiting up to a day to get to Brussels (which was in a blizzard) just for two nights stay was looking grim, so we bailed out and went back home.

My next journey was a few days later, driving up to Aberdeen.

This was surprisingly easy. M11, M25, M1, A50, M6 – completely fine. Stopped overnight in Preston, then onward the next day to Aberdeen.

This started out OK, but due to black ice and trucks jack knifing on the motorways, I was diverted across country (B roads then A71) and this was a bit hairy, with about 40 miles of untreated twisty country roads. Herman became a snow plough in places and nearly ended up in a ditch a couple of times – very slippery – but got through OK.

Aberdeenshire was supposed to be under 3 miles of snow, but the last leg up the east coast was actually fine, only thwarted by the last 100 metres by the slippery and steep untreated road up to my dad’s house.

Compared to a friend’s attempt to fly up to Edinburgh from Luton, my journey was really easy.

On the way home now. Last night I drove down from Aberdeen to South York, via Newcastle. Again, mostly easy, with only one scary high speed black ice bit on the A697 where Herman fortunately kept going in the same direction

Side note – Coldstream is a very nice little town to stop for a break, as the parking was free and the toilets immaculately kept.

Just had breakfast and waiting for the sun to come up a bit for heading off for the final 3.5 hours.

Finger crossed it doesn’t all end in doom!

Update: arrived safely, and typically, it was just raining heavily for the last 20 miles to London.