It was 6:30 p.m. Saturday, and the chess team and I had just obtained our second-place trophy at the West Chicago Open Team Tournament. We were ready to leave and begin our three-hour drive from Chicago back to Champaign. However, the moment we exited the building, we were immediately struck by a huge gust of wind, and we saw that the landscape was covered in a layer of white.

When we got onto the road, we were all exhausted and tired from the chess tournament and predicted that we would get back at around 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. We were wrong.

After traveling about for two hours, we stopped and ate dinner at a McDonald’s at a gas station. By the time we got on the road again, it was 9 p.m. I was very confident that we were going to be back home by 10 p.m.

Unfortunately, while we were enjoying our meal at McDonald’s, the snow outside had increased dramatically. The cars driving on the highway were going extremely slowly, and some cars had fallen in the ditches.

While we saw flashing police lights and cars stuck in the snow, the storm was becoming more and more intense. Our white turtle van was going about 45 miles per hour at first, but the accumulating snow made us slow to 30, then 25, then 20, and finally 15.

Going 15 miles per hour on the highway is pretty sad, but it was as fast as we could safely go.

We finally returned to Uni after a grueling six-hour drive, and I’m glad that nothing really bad happened. The closest call was when we were almost back at Uni — all of a sudden I flew out of my seat and bashed myself against the set in front of me.

The van had hit a bump and almost flipped over. I thought I died … well, not really, but it felt like I died. I experienced my first trip in a really bad snowstorm, and, hopefully, I won’t have to go through something like that again.