Sorry this has been posted so late but I have an excuse. My wife and I got delayed on the way back from visiting her parents in New Mexico over Christmas. I’ve never encountered an ice storm before – they’re deceptively nasty and not at all like the snow storms we get in the UK. Maybe when we passed four overturned SUVs in the space of one mile on the way to the airport we should have realised something was up. Ice built up on the windscreen and was impervious to the windscreen wipers. Linda’s dad was driving and all it took was one slight tap on the brakes to send us spinning gracefully into the shallow ditch at the side of the road. Luckily no damage was done, and we rejoined the road and made it gingerly to the airport in time to discover that all the flights out had been cancelled for the day. Our next flight out was not to be until New Years Day – we were stuck in Lubbock for two days.

We found a hotel in North Lubbock – and as soon as we got there we realised we’d stranded ourselves in a building that was the sole occupant of a vacant lot with nothing around us for at least a mile in any direction. That’s not normally something I’d worry about, but these were not normal conditions. It was dark by the time we reached the hotel and all we could see out the window were the distant lights of a corner drug store on the horizon, with a vast expanse of flat whiteness between us and civilization.

The temperature the next day was -11ºC. We managed to make an expedition to a strip mall by foot in the afternoon and found supplies there.

To cut a long story short, we finally arrived in London at 12 noon on January 2nd, and drove back to Hastings that afternoon, collecting two very pissed off cats on the way home.

It’s taken 24 hours for the cats to forgive us, but they’ve now turned into a couple of cuddle bunnies and quite determined not to let us ever go off on holiday again. Don’t worry cats; after that journey back, I’m not planning to go again for a good while…