Snow way back

While we were waiting for the turkey and ham fest to begin on Christmas Day, this amazing cloud came rolling towards mum's house like a sort of aerial tsunami. I was convinced it was going to bury the house under a thick layer of snow. Instead, it just kind of petered out before I'd had my first Brussels sprout.

However, the cloud convinced me that we needed to see some snow while we were sandwiched between the Alps and the Massif Central so the following day we bundled into two cars and armed with mum's vague instructions headed northwest in search of the white stuff.

Looking at the map with mum, I saw a large red road heading right up to the place I was pretty convinced would deliver a white slope suitable for sledging. But she assured me that a much smaller yellow line on the map was a quicker and easier way to get there.

We set off and 40 minutes later started seeing snow on either side

 of the road. I was in the passenger seat next to Irmie and Rob and his kids were behind us.

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before but I'll come clean now: I hate heights.

So imagine my joy when the road started winding up a series of sharp turns none of which had so much as a kerbstone separating us from a precipitous plunge down the mountainside to our instant deaths. And the snow started settling on the road. 

I began expecting to see terrified mountain goats trudging back shaking their heads.

After about 20 minutes (which felt to me like 20 hours) we pulled over in a snow-covered observation point. To my great relief, Rob agreed that it was madness to continue up to the top of the hill. His argument, which I was more than happy to buy into, was that while getting up might be OK, driving back down an increasingly icy road in gathering gloom was probably not a great idea.

We stayed where we were and had a pretty good snowball fight while French drivers screeched past showering us with slush.