What's The Most Fun You've Had Driving In The Snow?

It's a lovely, sunny 80 degrees in Los Angeles as I'm sitting on my balcony while writing this story, and yes I have been rubbing that in the faces of my coworkers who live in New York City and have been hit with a giant blizzard this week. I'm allowed to do that — I grew up outside Boston for my first eighteen years of life and subsequently lived in Michigan for eight years, so I'm no stronger to horrible winters, and on Saturday mornings it was 46 degrees out in LA! That's the equivalent of, like, twenty below freezing anywhere else.

I had a wonderful time driving my car along the coastline with the windows down over the weekend, while my colleague Andy was headed to Jersey in treacherous conditions that were decidedly not fun, even in his Maserati Grecale press car. That got me thinking about the most fun I've ever had behind the wheel in the snow, and now I want to pose that thought as a question to our readers. What's the most fun you've ever had driving in the snow?

Whether it was all because of the car, the conditions or a combination of both, I want to hear your most memorable stories of having fun in the snow on four wheels. I've been lucky enough to have a lot of amazing wintertime automotive memories. Of course I could talk about daily driving my old Mercedes-Benz 300TD wagon, rallycross-prepped NA Mazda Miata, and straight-piped Volvo 940 Turbo wagon through Michigan winters. Then there are the work trips I've been on, like when I got to drive AMGs up a closed Austrian mountain pass, or when I took a Bentley Flying Spur on snow tires up to Big Bear for a weekend.

But I think the most fun I've ever had in the snow was on the first drive for the Volvo V60 Cross Country, all the way in Luleå, Sweden, near the Arctic Circle. In addition to lots of regular on-road driving and an off-road course, Volvo set up a huge race track on a frozen lake for the express purpose of us getting the studded-tire-wearing wagons as sideways as possible. The track was shaped like a really big oval, but instead of straightaways on each side there were snaking S-curves. When we arrived at the lake the sun was just appearing over the horizon, where it would stay for only a few hours. It felt like I was on another planet entirely. I put on some "Initial D" Eurobeat and drifted around for over an hour — not to brag, but I did the best job out of anyone, getting big thumbs up from the Volvo team every time I passed by the pit lane.

Now, what about you? What's the most fun you've ever had when driving in the snow? I want to hear all about it. I'll round up my favorite answers later this week.