Cheating death

Nat's brother Clarke and his partner Lyndsay are away for the weekend to celebrate their birthdays. The plan was always to meet up with them at Crieff Hydro for dinner, little did we know Clarke has arrange a surprise for all of us.

Clarke proposed to Lyndsay and she said yes. How exciting for you both, congratulations! Let the wedding planning begin!

Now I know that none of that has anything to do with my title or the above image, but I'm getting to that.

We were also staying the night, but not in Crieff. We were staying in Kenmore some 25 miles away. It looked like it should take about 40-50 minutes because the roads weren't the best.

We set off following our sat nav quite happily, until 30 minutes into the journey we come across this sign... Road closed. We couldn't see any real reason why the road would be closed so we decided to continue, but with caution.

We couldn't have gone more than a four hundred meters or so when we came to quite a steep turn. It was quite icy so Nat and her dad switched so he could get past the worst of it. We made it around the bend without too much trouble and continued up the hill. The road was getting quite icy by this point with patches of snow all over the place. Despite this and the shear drop on our left hand side we decided to press on, after all we had made it this far.

Another few hundred meters and it was like driving on an ice rink, the revs on the car were up and the back end was sliding about all over the place. Are we going to make it? We were so close to the edge at one point I thought we were going over. Tensions in the car were high, we must be through the worst of it... do we contine and risk certain death? what's the alternative? Reverse down this sheet of ice in the pitch dark? One last push to see if we could get any further, no it wasn't working. We 're sliding and now within inches of hitting a huge rock on our right hand side. STOP!

This is serious now, we're stuck on the side of a hill, in freezing temperatures with no phone signal. What do we do? The only thing we could do, we had to try and head back.

I got out of the car, and using my phone as a torch (the only thing it was good for at this point), I helped guide Glenn down. Scouting ahead and checking how slippy the road was. Slowly, inch by inch we were getting there. We reached a patch of grass with just enough room for us to edge the car around while narrowly avoiding a drop into the black abyss below. From that point it was a bit easier, as long as we took it slowly.

When we finally reached the bottom it was a huge relief and my blip today is a sobering reminder never to ignore a 'road closed' sign.