Tuesday 5th December 2017

This morning we took on diesel and LPG before leaving Corte as we were planning a long trip south on minor roads through the mountainous spine of Corsica. Things didn't start too well as we were held up for quite a while in a lorry jam on the main road south in the village of Vivario.

When we turned off onto D69 the minor road south I failed to notice that though the snow plough had cleared the road itself quite well it had piled high banks of snow up on each side of the narrow road leaving insufficient width to turn round.

As we got higher up the pass the road became more and more icy and we realised that the most sensible thing to do was to turn round and go back down but there was nowhere to turn round.

We decided that the only thing we could do was to try to reverse back down the numerous icy hairpin bends which we had come up.

It is much harder to reverse round hairpin bends than to go round them going forward. The first one we got to proved too difficult and we reversed into deep snow and got stuck. We put on our snow chains and were able to get unstuck but still unable to turn round so we continued up the pass.

After a short distance we stopped to check on the snow chains tightness which is what you are supposed to do at which point we realised one of the chains had broken.

We continued on up and stopped again to check on the chains only to find that the broken one had fallen off and was missing.

We continued up the pass with just the one chain in place and eventually reached the top where we could turn round. We descended back the way we had come carefully, picking up the broken chain on the way.

We were very glad to get back to the main road and continue our journey south by an alternative route.

We passed through some stunning scenery. We have stopped for the night at a picnic area off the main N196 near to the village of Petreto-Bisschisano.

Today we traveled 84 miles (135 kilometres). We are at N41.78005 E8.96348

Petreto-Bisschisano.