Don’t act like you’re not impressed: Why sliding around in the snow is just fun.

It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s – a void in space where time has no real meaning. I’ve lost track of the days and have adapted to a new way of life that includes me playing Disney Princess Monopoly with my daughter until the wee hours of 10 p.m. To make matters even more bizarre, it has snowed a lot. In the eight years, I’ve lived in Vancouver, I’ve never seen a white Christmas and I’ve never gone out sliding in the snow.

I’m originally from Saskatchewan, so my relationship to snow is much different than that of a typical Vancouverite. If you figure there are five-to-six months of winter per year and multiply that by thirty years, it culminates in fourteen-ish years of straight winter (disclaimer: I was a Fine Arts major, not a mathematician). Part of the draw of moving to Vancouver was to escape traditional frigid prairie winters. The idea of snow being a recreation to me has never really existed. With temperatures hovering between -15 C and -45 C for months on end, the idea of spending any sort of prolonged time out in the cold seemed like torture, and winter was an obstacle that stood between me and my summer car.

As I wrapped a game of Disney Princess Monopoly, I got a message from Gerard (of SerialNine success) saying he was going to meet up with the crew from Checkpoint and partake in his favorite winter past-time… snow drifting. After explaining to my wife that “I, a 37-year-old man, was going to go watch people slide around in the snow” and calming down my four-year-old daughter, who cried at the idea of me going out late in the snow… I realized that living in Vancouver has probably made my family a bit soft.

Now for some radical honesty: Snow drifting has never really been my thing. In the prairies, it was an activity that was relegated to the teenagers that couldn’t really cut it on the track in the summer. It didn’t really warrant shooting it because the risk of standing in the freezing cold wasn’t worth the reward. Things have evolved in Saskatchewan now, and the drift community now holds a drift event on a frozen lake. I think others have gone so far as to build private ice tracks during the winter.

But I digress. This article isn’t about Saskatchewan, but mild Vancouver – which has a SerialNine Toyota Blit. There will be plenty of information on Gerard’s car in the coming months, but for now, I was just excited to see the car in action.

It may sound like I disliked the entire premise of this outing, but I assure you that was not the case. First, being able to stand outside in the snowy winter, without having the air hurt your face, was nice. Second, as we spent a decent amount of time looking for suitable snow to slide around in, I gained some perspective: While the prairies take snow for granted, the west coast covets it and seeks it out.

Before we go any further, I should acknowledge a few things… the legality of this is obviously on the questionable side, but realistically, most people sliding around in the snow are doing it at a fairly low speed. The combination of grabbing the wrong, very slow memory card, and shooting cars sliding at a slower pace, led to some pretty so-so shots. However, I don’t think sliding around in the snow really impresses anyone. I think it’s just fun. And there are also some fundamentals of car control that be learned from the activity – and you get to learn it all in slow motion.

In this edition of real talk, I suspect a large portion of greater Vancouver could probably learn a thing or two from purposely sliding around in the snow. It doesn’t snow here a ton, but when it does, everything gets turned upside down. And it’s not just the drivers. The other day during a snowfall, I witnessed a pedestrian completely forget how a crosswalk works (probably because they were wearing a t-shirt).

The night was a refreshing change from the void between Christmas and the New Year. And instead of waiting for summer to arrive, I enjoyed being able to pick up my camera and be around cars in action.