TOWSON, Md. - The Tiger men's basketball team will head to Fairfax, Va. to take on George Mason on Saturday afternoon. The weather forecast is not great - rain with a high of 41 degrees.

To me, sophomore Erique Gumbs and Associate Director of Athletics for Sports Performance James Shipp, it will seem like a trip to Hawaii. You see, the three of us will be the sole survivors of last year's 11-hour trip to face the Patriots. 

In our last trip to George Mason, we boarded a Dillon's bus for a 3 p.m. departure from the Towson Center loading dock. (Not only are there only three of us left from last year's trip, but the loading dock is no longer around either due to the construction of Tiger Arena.)  Like the rest of us, our bus driver James had no idea what we were heading into. James is a great guy that has taken the Tiger men and women on many trips. As a matter of fact, James was there to pick us up from the airport this past Saturday night when the Tigers returned from playing Georgia State. 

Normally, the trip to George Mason takes between 75 and 90 minutes to get there, so we settled in for the short trip. There was snow in the forecast, but it wasn't supposed to hit until after we got to Fairfax.

I read over my game notes and then, put on my Ipod for a short nap. When I woke up, it was about 4:15 and we had just gotten onto the Capital Beltway. My first thought was we are making really good time. That was a mistake. 

Not more than 5 minutes after I woke up, the snow hit.  And it hit hard. And traffic stopped.  I mean it STOPPED.  We were not more than 15 miles from Mason's campus, but as it turned out, we might as well have been in St. Louis. We sat. And we sat. And we sat some more. The snow was coming down as hard as I have ever seen and because it had not been severely cold, the roads were now starting to freeze along with the snow cover. 

At this point, we realized that we were not getting to the Patriot Center on time. Then Coach Pat Kennedy started having discussions with then Mason Coach Jim Larranaga and Tiger Director of Athletics Mike Waddell. A decision was made to push back the game time to 9 p.m.

By about 7 p.m., James decided to get off the Capital Beltway and try another route. We were on a road I can't recall now, but there was a traffic light about half a mile ahead.  Coach Kennedy had just told me the game had been pushed back to 9 p.m. I looked at him and said, “Coach, do you see that traffic light? We will be lucky to get to it by 8:30." We hit that light at 8:22 p.m.

We finally tried to get onto Route 66, but disaster struck again - we got stuck on the ramp.  We were on that thing for over two hours. James tried every way he could to get that bus moving, but nothing worked. At one point, he was spinning his wheels so hard that the burning rubber made the entire bus full of smoke.

We all got off the bus. I was standing next to former Tiger freshman Milton Geddes, who is from Florida. He was on the phone with his mother and I will never forget him telling her that it looked like the end of the world.

There was one casualty that night - Coach Kennedy's trench coat. It was a duplicate of the coat worn by Peter Falk in the old TV show "Columbo." Pat had that coat since before he came to Towson. For some reason, he and James thought that the trench coat would give enough traction for the bus to finally break free. There are probably still pieces of that coat along that ramp somewhere. The bus was still stuck.

We finally made it to a hotel in Manassas around 1:30 a.m. The game was played that afternoon at 4 p.m. It actually worked out well for George Mason; not only did the Patriots win the game, but they drew 3,791 people. They had free admission, which certainly helped the crowd.  But, if they sold ten hot dogs, they made more money than they would have if the game had been played in the middle of the blizzard.

For those of us on the bus that night, it's a trip we will never forget. Trust me - 41 degrees and rain this Saturday sounds like heaven.

Programming Note: Join me and Damon Lewis this Thursday night at Bill Bateman's in Towson for another edition of Tiger Talk from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Our guests will be Tiger men's basketball coach Pat Skerry and gymnastics coach Vicki Chliszczyk. If you can't make it out to Bill Bateman's, you can hear Tiger Talk on WNST-AM 1570 or right here on TowsonTigers.com.