Ready For Winter?

What do you do when someone asks you to try out winter tires when there’s no snow on the ground outside?

You take the cars inside.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful city of Denver, Colorado to get ready for winter driving with Bridgestone Tires and Tire Rack to learn about what it really means to have the proper winter tires on your vehicle. And if you know me, you know that I am an excellent driver but I don’t actually own winter tires. Boy, the lengths people will go to just to prove their point.

Our day started at the Denver Zoo (weird right? stay with me) to learn about how mother natures been way ahead of our technology since well, forever. Biomimicry is the adaptation of mother natures technology to solve human problems using human technology. So for instance, the polar bear walks, runs and exists on ice and snow and lets be honest, how many polar bears do you see spun out in the ditch in the winter?

Makes sense right? So after exploring the zoo we were off to the Pepsi Centre to really put the tires to the test. We got behind the wheel of 2 different vehicles, one with all season tires and one with Blizzak winter tires and aside from the tires and the colour of the car, they were identical in every other way but what a difference in grip! They had a special NASA (not really NASA) computer in the cars to analyze the acceleration and stopping distance to show me that on my all season tires it would take me an average of 20 feet more to stop than if I had winter tires. WOW. That could be the difference between taking out a deer in the road and not. I would prefer the ‘not’.

So yeah, I guess you could say that I’m a believer now. Winter tires, especially since we live in winter 10 months of the year, are a valuable safety tool.

We ended the day with a working dinner. Say wha? Yeah, they actually made us work for our dinner, Master Chef style. We were all split into 5 groups and by answering trivia questions, collected coins that we could spend in the pantry to buy ingredients. Under the pressure of a timer we had to make pasta noodles and a sauce from scratch and then plate it. It was intense and hilarious and of course, the best team won (hint, it was my team).