Revscene Summer Meet 2014: Home, Sweet Home

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been lacking on my self-inflicted responsibilities for DODOlogic of late. Now that I’ve finally relocated to Vancouver, I feel like I can start trying to get myself settled in. At the age of 30, I’ve really put myself in somewhat of an unfamiliar predicament. I feel like the new kid in school trying to figure out where to sit in the cafeteria. That being said, nothing makes me feel more at home than car events.

 

In an attempt to make my new home feel like home, I’ve had to familiarize myself with a new, much larger community. Revscene has served as a type of compass for me in that sense. I was pretty excited to be able to attend their summer meet at SilverCity Riverport Cinemas in Richmond.

My past visits to Vancouver never lined up with this annual meet, so after many years of wanting to check it out, I finally got the chance. The 8:30AM wake-up time on a Sunday was not awesome, but I managed to save time by washing my car the night before and scrapping into my underground parking spot to protect it from getting sullied.

The meet went from 10AM-2PM. I arrived at 10:10 and the lot was already pretty full. Some helpful Revscene volunteers directed me to available parking and then I started to peruse the hundreds of cars at the event. It was a particularly sweltering day and I had committed to wearing a flannel shirt, which was just a little bit less refreshing than drinking a carton of milk on a hot day.

My DODOlogic compatriot and fellow prairie expat, Devan Francis, joined me on this expedition. He did away with his usual video camera and brought a DSLR instead. I assume we’ll see some coverage from him as well.

Getting down to brass tacks, it quickly dawned on me that there’s much more to the Vancouver scene than I originally thought. As an outsider looking in, I had become familiar with names like Art of Stance, Circuit Soul, SerialNine and even Death Squad.

But as I strolled the parking lot, I came across new crews and teams – like Classified and NV US. This sense of unfamiliarity is a great thing, as it underscores the fact that it will take a long time for the scene to become old hat.

RevScene attracts a good variety of cars and my recent visits to Vancouver meets have rekindled an admiration for certain things. Although I’ll probably never really move out of owning a RWD, I can definitely see the appeal of being a Honda enthusiast.

Everyone at the meet seemed to be well behaved, so the eye rolling that often occurs at meets of this scale was kept to a minimum. There’s no doubt that a bunch of work goes into planning an event like this and it was nice to see people respect that.

With all the unfamiliarity, it’s nice to sometimes run into the familiar. It’s obviously exciting for me whenever I see that happy cat chowing down on poutine…

Meets are always a strange thing. The very idea of them might seem silly to someone who’s not into cars. And I get it; you have hundreds of like-minded strangers who heard about a meet on the internet and decide to spend a good portion of their Sunday milling about a movie theatre parking lot. But it’s about being part of a community, and it’s essentially the same wherever you go. As a car enthusiast, it never feels like you’re far from home when you’re standing in a parking lot talking about cars.