What could be more idyllic, thought the novelist, than a winter roadtrip to Paris by motorbike? Cue snowstorms, traffic jams and breakdowns

It was 1986, Christmas approaching. My sister Mopsa had spent five years riding a Triumph motorcycle and sidecar around the world with her husband, Richard. They were now heading from Cairo (palms, feluccas, pyramids, minarets) to Paris (brasseries, onion soup, Nôtre Dame), aiming to be home in London in time for… you get the drift.

I was working for a motorcycle magazine then, and our editor thought it would be a great angle to have me ride to Paris and escort them back in glory. My preferred motorcycles are old, black, low and throaty; he selected for me something state-of-the-art, flighty, high and Japanese, possibly a Honda VFR750. But this was my mission and I chose to accept it.

Mopsa, Richard and I were to meet on 23 December under the Arc de Triomphe, turn around, and be home by Christmas Eve. What could be more festive and joyous?

So I gathered my waterproofs, tucked my boyfriend Fred on the pillion, and headed south. Laughed at, at every border and tollbooth from Dover to the Périphérique, he quickly learned to remove his helmet with a flourish and declare ‘Je suis feminist!’, which went down well.

The French railways were en grève ,sono trains ran and the roads were nose-to-tail.

Meanwhile Mopsa and Richard were on a ferry from Haifa to Ancona; they were sleeping in sleeping bags in a petrol station outside Turin, they were bump-starting the bike and heading for the Alps. And then the sidecar mount fixing snapped, somewhere after Lyon. They were towed to Mâcon; told to sign a disclaimer before the welder would agree to weld the sidecar back on.

It’s usually three hours give or take, from Calais to Paris. But the weather was shocking: wind, sleet, snow, ice, snow on ice. After 30 miles in this nightmare, we gave up, snowed in near St Omer. ‘Louisa has disappeared’, it says in Mopsa’s diary.

The next day was hardly better, the wind wild, the weather bitter. On the only open lane of the A26 I chose a strip of tyre-track where the fallen snow, though barely visible through the snow still falling, was at least packed down solid. We were not so much bold as terrified, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative. Paris or bust! So we rode on, knees bent, shoulders hunched, eyelashes frozen, thinking of Captain Scott.

When we finally drew up beside the Seine, I couldn’t move my legs. We holed up across the river from Nôtre Dame, at the Hôtel Esmeralda, where the carpets went halfway up the wall and even the ceilings were covered in flowery wallpaper. We ate éclairs in the bath, and waited. A bottle of Champagne waited with us, on the ledge outside our attic window, tucked into the snowdrift: a little bit The Little Princess; a little bit Sous les toits de Paris; quite a lot Richard Curtis. The snow fell.

Mopsa and Richard arrived around 6pm on Christmas Eve. Can you imagine the tears? The twinkling lights in the snow? The Gothic cathedral (the bells! The bells!); the reflections of flying buttresses in the icy Seine, the warm hugs, the cold Champagne? I gave Mopsa a pair of grey Ralph Lauren thermal long johns, which proved a perfect gift for a long-distance biker. Supper was a delicious tagine at an Algerian café, utterly uninterested in the birth of Jesus or any of the commercial attachments.

On Christmas morning we went to the Arc de Triomphe; we felt we had triumphed rather magnificently. And we needed photographs. For Christmas lunch we found a brasserie: onion soup, omelettes and cake. And on Boxing Day the sun came out. The bikes’ shadows fell on the road to Calais and on to the ferry, the White Cliffs of Dover gleamed, and we got back to our childhood home late that night. It was another month before we learned there had been a fifth rider along on the trip: Mopsa was pregnant with their firstborn.

Twelve Months and a Day, by Louisa Young , is out now (Borough Press, £14.99)