Here is my winter story...
I went to college in NH. One long weekend my roommate and I decided to go to Canada. My roommate was from Thailand and his father was a diplomat so he had a diplomatic passport. We figured that would get us right over the boarder with no problems. Well it didn't, but more on that later.
We were very poor college students so we borrowed money from my brother (he was in high school at the time) to take this trip. He gave us $200 and that is all we had between the two of us. As we started loading my roommates car we realized that the inspection sticker had expired. We were not sure if we could get over the boarder with an expired sticker so we decided to take my car instead. the only problem was that my windshield wipers were broken. That is OK though. We decided nothing was going to stop us and we would just take out chances.
We drive all night and get to the boarder in the very early morning. At the boarder they ask where we were born. As soon as they find out my roommate is foreign they ask for his passport. Hey diplomatic passport, not problem right? Wrong. There is a crack down the spine of the passport so they think it is forged. They take him in a back room and interrogate him for hours. His English was pretty good, but he still had trouble with some colloquialisms so I wanted to help translate, but they would not allow me back there with him. After many hours he comes out and tells me that we have two options. We can turn around and go home (not going to happen after all that) or we can pay the boarder guard the equivalent of $66 US dollars and THEN he will decide if he will let us in the country (read: bribe). Of course we paid the money, but that was either our drinking money or hotel money. I think you can guess which it was.
We found an underground parking garage and pulled in. We steamed up the windows so no one could see in and grabbed some shut eye. When we woke up we had to kill some time before we could start drinking. Being very low on money we went to a Burger King and each bought a small hot chocolate. It was a very nice BK with two stories and an entire wall made of glass that looked out over the intersection of two streets on a big hill. As we were sitting there it started to snow. it was coming down harder and faster than I had ever seen. We were watching the beginnings of a major blizzard. We sat there and watched car after car slide down the big hill and crash into the next one. We must have seen 30 car crashes over the course of a few hours.
We eventually decided that we really needed to head home after all. We get to my car and all you could see was my antenna sticking out of the snow. After getting it cleared off we start to drive home, without windshield wipers, in a blizzard. We stopped at a gas station and stole a squeegee so that we could at least try to clear the snow off the window. We would drive a few hundred feet, stop the car and get out and clear the window, then do it all over again.
Because visibility was so poor and also because the road signs were in French, we missed our turn to get on the highway. We ended up driving parallel to the US boarder for many many many hours. We eventually figured out where we where and how to get home, but it took us about an extra 8 hours out of our way.
It was the trip from hell, but one of my most treasured memories from college