I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Tempe, AZ working with David on establishing a JavaScript toolchain. More on that in a later post. Driving back New Years Eve, though, I got caught in the snow in Arizona!Obviously, it snows in Flagstaff … but I was driving northbound on US 93 when what should have been three hours became six.

I drive an Impreza STi (thank you Gran Turismo for letting me test-driven so many great cars on Trial Mountain). Sure, an AWD Subaru is supposed to be a great snow car but my car’s tires are basically “summer” tires. It’s not that they don’t work in snow or rain but … they don’t work as well as I would like. In fact, they work pretty poorly.

Even though I’m driving a rally car I considered the snow to be “sufficiently intense” that I just drove relaxed and slowly.

It’s interesting to watch other drivers in snow. The “normal cars” and I were moving along, sometimes as low as 4 MPH, sometimes as high as 20 MPH. The pickup trucks and SUVs with their four wheel drive often felt compelled to demonstrate how amazing their vehicles were by flying past us mere cars.

And they were amazing. They spin most elegantly before sliding off the road and down the slight embankment and coming to a stop unable to move.

I’ve seen this before; I drive a lot and have for years.

In 1998 (over the Xmas/New Years period) a friend and I drove from Bellingham, WA, to Los Angeles, CA, to Las Vegas, NV, to Phoenix, AZ, to Austin, TX, to St. Louis, MO, to Nashville, TN, to Minneapolis, MN, to Vancouver, WA, and back to Bellingham. We were doing a tour visiting MUCK players at book stores — it was great fun. But it meant we drove through snow and ice most of the trip. We took it easy, we made it.

How to survive thousand of miles driving through snow and ice? Slow down. Yeah, not very pithy, I know.

Thanks to the amazingly slow pace though I saw my New Years turn from 2014 to 2015 on US-93 north of Kingman, AZ while in Arizona.

A bit later, I crossed into NV … and had my second 2015 New Years as I passed from Mountain time into Pacific time.

Thanks to rare snow in Arizona I got to celebrate 2015 arriving twice. I am an official time traveller, now. I’ve driven from 2015 to 2014. And back.

Where are the flying cars, hoverboards, and the weather service controlling the weather?

Keep the Light and let’s enjoy 2015 mina-san!