> > > The thing about driving through snow is that you have to be one with it. You have to respect it, because the moment you stop respecting it, it kills you. But otherwise it's mind over matter. Be the snow. Be the car. Be the road. Then you can do your respecting without stressing, and navigating through snow banks becomes almost fun.
> >
> > Wow. I LOVE hearing people say stuff like that.
>
> You bought that crock? ;-) I gave that speech to Darleen as we were coming home from the restaurant and poofing through snow banks, and she said something like, "Ok. You're weird, Sam."

LOL! I read through that, and my mind went "Cool. OK, good. Hmm... That's a little odd, but I guess if you don't see snow that much, driving in it could be a sort of a Zen thing... Oh yeah, driving through snow banks IS fun." So basically, yeah, I keyed into the one part and decided to let the rest slide as "a silly NH quirk". :-)

> But in spite of the dramatically philosophical phrasing, I stand by all that, especially the "respect the snow" part, which is what I bet you keyed into. As long as you respect the fact that snow can make your car do very bad things if you treat it wrong, you should be ok. It was fun plowing through snow drifts and sliding around corners, but I was driving carefully. In any storm like this, naturally, there are lunatics that don't respect the precariousness of the snow on the road, and they drive too fast, and those are the folks that flashing blue lights attend by roadside ditches. One of the reasons going out in that mess was so much fun was because there weren't so many other drivers to look out for.
>
> Ice, on the other hand, you can respect all you want, and it'll still kill you.

Hmm. Interesting. My dad taught me some ice driving techniques as well (Lesson number one is don't drive on it unless you have to, but lesson number two is what to do if you DO have to). Of course, very few people I know can do that very well, and I am very out of practice-- we don't get much ice in Calgary. Basically, driving on ice can be summed up in one key concept: Don't fight inertia. If your car starts sliding in the wrong direction on ice and you try to turn the wheel and go the right way, you'll just keep sliding. The key is getting the wheels to move in the direction of the slide at the speed of the slide until you're not sliding anymore, and then VERY gently shifting direction until you're back on course. As you can imagine, you have to go pretty slowly as a general rule, because if you go too fast, you're going to be off the road before you can even start to regain control. I know this sounds obvious, but with all the training we get on how to regain control when fishtailing and such, it becomes very counter intuitive to try to do this in a real situation.

Well, that's the ice driving lesson for today. Practical experience does far more than one typed lesson based on vague recollections, but I don't think there are ANY RinkyDinks who get enough ice to actually go practice this stuff. I myself have only used this knowledge once or twice since I learned it.

Don "Didactic" Monkey