We were planning on driving home from Arkansas on Monday. When the weather turned bad on the mountain, everything got moved up a day. But then we heard that a winter storm was due to hit central Illinois on Sunday afternoon and evening. We contemplated hanging around, but decided to go for it anyway.
The rain began as we left Conway and continued all morning. We stopped for lunch at Panera in Marion, Illinois and while we ate, the rain turned to snow. Back on the Interstate, the pavement was still clear and traffic was heavy as we headed north. Around Mt. Vernon, slush started building up along the center line, making lane changes a bit tricky. Then the snow picked up. Visibility decreased significantly. Driving got tricky.
It wasn’t just the roads. There were people in cars who were driving 35 or 40 mph while truckers were racing at 75 or 80 to beat the storm. When a car going 45 pulled out to pass a car going 35, traffic screeched to a halt, and in the near white-out conditions, it was dangerous.
I settled into the passing lane behind a semi that was behaving less recklessly than most. Things went fine for a time, but eventually he had to slam on his brakes. I hit mine hard and stopped in time, perhaps 15 feet away. But then I looked in my rear-view and saw another semi coming fast and not stopping. My first instinct was to pull into the right lane and I started that way, but there was an SUV there. I was stuck. I crept forward as far as I could, to within a foot or two of the semi in front of me. I was saying, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.” The trucker behind me finally realized what was happening and locked his brakes. He skidded and shuttered to a stop in a cloud of black brake smoke about two feet from my rear bumper. We came that close to being a sandwich.
By the time Sal realized what was happening, it was over. I found a space in the right lane and settled in at a much slower pace. The semi that almost hit me barreled by at about 75 mph and that settled it.
We pulled off at the next exit, which happened to be Effingham. I felt like a wimp for not continuing, but we had a day to play with. We found a room in a Hampton Inn. When I was checking in, another guy came in and said he’d just been rear-ended by a truck. Everyone in his car was OK, but the car was totaled.
It was just 3:30 in the afternoon. None of the streets in Effingham had been plowed yet, and there was about five inches of wet snow everywhere.
At 5:30, we drove about a mile to Culver’s for supper. The roads had been plowed but were still slick and it was still snowing hard. We realized we were just a mile from the giant cross along the interstate. It was at the end of a one-lane dirt road. The parking lot wasn’t cleared, so I took a red chair photo from near the car. The cross was barely visible through the snow. There wasn’t room to turn around, so I backed up a quarter mile until I could turn in a Fed-Ex entrance.
Back at the hotel, Sal watched a couple episodes of Walking Dead while I watched Doctor Who on my iPad.
On Monday, we weren’t in a hurry. I borrowed a snow brush/scraper from the front desk and cleared at least four inches off my car. (I didn’t have my brush because it was March and I was heading to Arkansas and knew I wouldn’t need it.)
We left for home at 9:00, and for the first mile or so, the Interstate was clear. But then things got worse. The pavement was coated with three inches of hard, packed snow/ice. Where it was smooth, it could be dealt with easily as long as I didn’t make any quick turns or stops.
But there were many places where chunks had broken out and the surface was rough and it felt like driving across a plowed field. Fortunately, there wasn’t as much traffic as on the night before. Many drivers were crawling — one was going as slowly as 12 mph. The trucks were going slowly too, more slowly than I wanted to. On one stretch, there was a cleared space down the middle of the highway with rough surface on either side. A jerk trucker was driving at 30 mph right down the middle and wouldn’t let anybody by except other truckers. When I realized what was happening, I got right behind a truck and passed with it before the jerk had a chance to get over — which he did as soon as I got by.
I’ve had a lot of practice on ice and snow, and where conditions (and trucks) allowed it, I went close to 50 mph. But I’ve never seen anything like that and hope I don’t again.
It took us two hours to go 60 miles. We got off in Matoon for lunch at McDonald’s. The surface was clear just north of there and we had no more problems. There were still a lot of cars off the road from the night before. Between Effingham and Kankakee, a distance of about 150 miles, we saw at least one car per mile off the road. In one spot, five were off together. We finally got home around 3:00 with no damages but with an adventure to tell.
