What’s the longest traffic jam you’ve ever navigated? Was it one mile of bumper-to-bumper cars? Three miles? Or have you ever navigated a whopping 10 miles of standstill traffic? Countless French drivers were stuck in a 109+ mile traffic jam in 1980 for an intriguing reason. The Lyon-Paris jam still holds the Guinness Record for world’s longest.

The year was 1980: As a new decade kicked off, Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” and Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” topped the Billboard charts. The box office, on the other hand, was dominated by The Empire Strikes Back. But many Parisians remember 1980 for an entirely different reason: an absolute nightmare of a traffic jam.

Lyon is the second-largest urban area of France, so traffic on the 243 mile drive from Paris to Lyon is expected. But in February 1980 a winter storm so bad hit the French Alps that countless Paris residents cut their ski vacations short. They all tried to drive home at the same time and–you guessed it–clogged up the roads.

The entire route wasn’t bumper-to-bumper, but much of it was. How long was this epic traffic jam? AT its peak it hit 109 miles of traffic.

This isn’t the world’s largest traffic jam or longest (chronologically). Largest traffic jam goes to the 18 million cars that tried to cross the East-West German border for Easter after the Berlin Wall came down in 1990. Longest (chronologically) was undoubtedly an 11-day traffic jam that crippled a highway outside Beijing in 2010.

While both of those traffic jams sound like a pain, I have to say a 109-mile traffic jam through the French Alps might be the most difficult one to circumnavigate. Especially because it predated GPS navigation by years.

Learn more about the 10 worst traffic jams ever in the video below: