My Christmasses alternate between England and Poland
And since my Britannic parents live in the middle of fucking nowhere, hours from an airport, train station or even a bus stop, I usually drive. So one 23rd of December, I bundled the girlfriend, a picnic hamper and lots of presents into my car and set off. "Turn. LEFT" barked my GPS, sounding like an aroused Helga from 'Allo 'allo. "Continue. STRAIGHT. for. ONE thousand FIVE hundred And.

SIX.

kilometres."

I don't know why GPS voices sound like that, but those were the directions I needed from my flat in Warsaw to the French port of Dunkirk, where my brit-bound boat awaited. I snicked the car into gear, patted the girl's leg, and set off.

We swept across the flat tedium of Poland in six hours, and had lunch at a roadside stop just south of Berlin. The air was bitterly cold and there was frost on the picnic benches, but the sky was clear and bright. At this pace, it would only be 10 hours to the French coast, or so we thought.

Two hours later the empty autobahn turned into a river of red lights. Three lanes at a standstill, packed solid. I shut off the engine and waited.

And waited. Still nothing moved. People were milling around, walking between cars. I dozed off.

After two more hours the girlfriend nudged me awake. Movement. Not of lights or cars though, but big flat snowflakes tumbling lazily from the sky. We watched, enthralled, and warmed ourselves with tea from the thermos as the black tarmac turned white under a frozen blanket.

We played Yahtzee to stay awake. The car next to us slipped off its handbrake and rolled backwards into a truck, causing a fight that alleviated the tedium for ten minutes. My girlfriend pissed into a water bottle that I'd carved into a rudimentary SheWee. We finished the picnic. The hours ticked on.

Finally, after seven hours parked on the autobahn, the engines around us roared into life. It was now well into the night, and the road was covered in at least a foot of snow. The cars slowly moved forwards, and the needle on my speedo barely reached the first numbers. As a convoy the traffic crawled through the snow at 20kmh. The snow had been a blizzard that swept across central Germany, shutting down the entire traffic infrastructure. We trundled past huge snowdrifts in the eerie flat landscape for two hours before pulling into a service station, freezing and exhausted.

It stopped snowing a few hours later, but only one lane of the autobahn had been cleared. With a few hours' kip in the back seat, I had the energy to plough on, and hit the Dutch border shortly after dawn. The snow fizzled out halfway though Belgium, and we arrived at the French coast at midday, Chrismas Eve, 30 hours after we'd left home.

There was only one more ferry making the crossing before Christmas Day, and that was in two hours. Add on two more hours for the crossing and time to get to my parents, and we finally dragged ourselves through the door of my Dad's house a full day later than planned, filthy and stinking from the journey, half-starved and sleep-blinded. What better state to introduce my girlfriend to my parents, whom she'd never met before?
( Grrrmachine the indifference engine, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 8:53, 6 replies)

I feel your pain, bruv.
Coming back from Holland going to the Channel Tunnel I sat on the motorway outside Antwerp for 9 hours.

Bloody Eurojonnies!
(Set your faces to Stunned Bigly, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 10:52, closed)

I like this.

( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 13:40, closed)

Not quite up to your usual lolfarts QOTW standard. At least you learned your lesson about choosing to live in a godforsaken freezing foodwrong third-world... oh wait no you didn't.

( 2 Can Chunder Word to your mums, I came to prod bums, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 14:36, closed)

The snow was in Germany. I don't live in Germany
I don't quite see what point you're trying to make.
( Grrrmachine the indifference engine, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 21:33, closed)

This gets a click purely for the phrase 'aroused Helga'.

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Mon 21 Dec 2015, 21:42, closed)

...and still better than RyanAir

( da5id <YOUR SIG HERE>, Fri 25 Dec 2015, 8:48, closed)