Leaving New Jersey

After a fairly uneventful flight from Edinburgh* and a remarkably quick immigration procedure we were all in good spirits at the Hertz office in Newark. The journey to our lovely hotel in Stowe, Vermont, was expected to take 6 and a half hours. Hmmm. Three and a half hours later, we finally left New Jersey (15 miles down, 331 miles to go). This is the George Washington Bridge into New York.

A further 2 hours later (7.30pm local time, 12.30 am our time) we finally crawled out of New York City at a stonking top speed of 10 miles an hour. Seems like people here don't like snow. About 20 minutes after that, the wipers gave up so we had to keep stopping to wipe ice, snow and salt off them and the windscreen.

At about midnight local time (5am for us poor souls) we gave up and started looking for a motel. Only to find that all the motels had been booked up by the local power company for a conference... only they hadn't showed up. (Turned out there'd been a big power cut so I suppose they weren't having a much better night than us.) Finally found somewhere to collapse for a few hours - dreaming of the lovely four poster bed we should have been in, crisp linen sheets and a big, deep whirlpool bath....

We shouldn't have been surprised really - we were here this time last year and did 3 big driving journeys, all of which coincided with progressively more severe and scary blizzards. We were wishing we'd gone for that upgrade to the 4x4....

*Well, apart from me and Mr B embarrassing the kids by howling with laughter while watching Ghost Town.