I was living in northern Scotland back in 2006 and my wife and I had a fairly decent lifestyle, living in a small apartment close to the sea in a small village situated between Aberdeen and Inverness. My wife was from the US and she needed some legal papers to be signed by the US consulate in Edinburgh.

The consulate at that time was only open for business on Tuesday and Thursday mornings so we planned to leave early and arrive in the city of Edinburgh around mid morning. It was about 200 miles away and once over the mountains we should be able to make the journey in about 4 hours.

As we woke up that winters morning it was still dark and a light flurry of snow had dusted the ground overnight. At around 6am we set off, it was still dark and we hoped to make good headway before the roads began to get a little busier. Our first place to drive through was the small city of Elgin and this was completed with ease and the next ten miles or so was mostly on empty roads with only one or two vehicles seen on the roads.

As the road started to climb the snow began to fall, lightly at first but as the elevation increased so did the snowfall. I was used to driving in snow and was not particularly concerned at this point, my car was in good condition so I was quite confident of arriving in Edinburgh ok. As the road rose and fell over the next few miles we witnessed a few incidents of poor driving, mostly people going too fast for the conditions and wondered if we would see these in a ditch somewhere further up the road having misjudged the road at some point.

We continued on our way and were now on the final climb of this section of road before it fell back into the next valley. At that point we would join a major route and the conditions should be better, at least snow ploughs should have been out on that road. As we approached the summit I was behind a large truck, it was from overseas and the driver was clearly struggling to keep his vehicle in a straight line. I knew with the steepness of the uphill gradient if he stopped and I could not get past him I could well be stuck here too. The approach to the summit on this road was a long straight section and as we came around the final curve I drove past the truck and found the last section of this road was full of other trucks. They were all stopped at the side of the road, as we drove past these I hoped nothing was coming the other way, if I had to stop I was now very worried that I would be joining these trucks in not going any further.