We were glad to get home yesterday after finding ourselves on an unexpected adventure whilst being stuck in amongst all the flooding chaos that has hit UK – we were attempting to get to Hotel Radcliffe for the weekend as Uncle Ted and Jenny were making a visit to the UK and we had been hoping to see them. What should have been an hour and ¾ in the car ended up being 7 hours of driving for Daddy and not even getting close!

We’d been listening pretty closely to the local radio for traffic updates as we had been going at almost no miles an hour for a very long time and we were pretty confidant that once we were past the point in the road we were on that was flooded, we should be ok! We were partly right – once past the mini lake that was creeping across the road, we picked up speed and sailed through…….until we came to join the motorway and found a rather enormous queue of stationary traffic! Thinking quickly, we reprogrammed “Turn Lest!” (as Isabel calls it, the rest of us think of it as the Sat Nav!) to take us to Pee-poos house avoiding the Motorway – very cunning idea till we found that the roads we wanted to go down were shut and Police vehicles towing boats were coming past us whilst we were in yet more stationary traffic! Had we had a good old fashioned paper map, we might have stood a chance of navigating a route through but we were totally reliant on the Sat Nav and nobody tells them when roads are shut! (or under 6 feet of water!)

By this point it was after midnight and we were, not surprisingly, very tired! We tried a Travellodge on the off chance they had a room available – they probably would have had a million other people not had the same idea! Once we had found a very obliging pub who let Mummy in to wash bottles and top up with water to make formula (and where we were later to discover that Mummy had left her purse and involved us ringing just about every pub in the local area until we figured out which one it was!), we ended up sleeping in the car from 1.30am to 4.30am (Isabel on the back seat and Molly stretched out on Mummy!) then tried to have another go at reaching our destination – at this point it was 5am and when we found ourselves on a roundabout we recognised we decided to call it quits and headed home! It ought to also be pointed out that poor Grandpa Pee-poo was also stuck in all the mayhem – he had been to our house on Friday to pick up 2 of our armchairs as a space making exercise and had left at 5pm………it was 8am the next day before he made it home, and we are very sorry that he had to go through such horribleness!

Upton-upon-Severn (or perhaps that is “under-Severn”?!) is now cut off completely by the river bursting it’s banks and the water board is thinking of disconnecting mains water as it might have been contaminated whilst the army is apparently bringing in food by boat – needless to say, Grandpa Pee-poo is now very glad that he had stocked the fridge and freezer in preparation for a family invasion that never happened……he now has plenty of food for him and Granny Rosie as Granny Pies has stayed on with her friends in Leyland (she had originally been due back on Saturday!) and Aunty Nanna never made it from London!

Here’s hoping the water levels drop soon!