Walking in a Winter Wonderland

I love the winter. It always gives me good feelings inside. There are so many good things that go on in the winter: Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day, sledding, hot chocolate, etc. I love all of them. This is one of my best memories of Winter.

When I was at Kirkwood, I spent a lot of time at Topher's apartment. His roommate, Woody, and I were pretty good friends as well, because we were both in theatre and had just been in "Urinetown" together. Yes, friends, that is the name of an ACTUAL show. A musical, in fact. Anyway, the first winter we knew each other, we were sitting around the apartment, bored, trying to find something to do. So Woody mentioned sledding. Topher and I thought that sounded fun, so we drove to Wal-Mart in search of a sled.

While there, I thought it'd be fun to get a big tupperware storage container and slide down the hill in that. So I spent the $20 and bought it. Woody bought a sled that looked more like a boogie board you would use in a pool than an actual sled. Topher bought a normal, circular sled. After Wal-Mart, we went over to my grandma's house, where I lived, and grabbed my video camera, because what's funnier than a bunch of grown people sledding like 8 year olds?

We went back to Topher and Woody's apartment and got ready to go sledding. Behind Linn Hall at Kirkwood was a really tall hill that we thought looked like a lot of fun. So we drove over there and trekked up to the top of the hill.

We went down the hill on Topher's sled a few times, and it was fun, but nothing spectacular. We tried Woody's sled, and it barely went half way down the hill. Slowly. We tried my storage container... And didn't move at all. The night was turning out to not be as fun as we thought. I started filming Topher and Woody when I got tired of walking back up the hill all the time. It was dark, so the footage kinda sucked, but you could still make out what we were doing.

Then, I got a brilliant idea.

"Hey, we should put the storage box on top of the boogie board."

Woody and Topher didn't think it would work, but nothing else was working that well, so we gave it a shot. We set the boogie board/sled on the snow and set the box on top of it. Topher and I held it steady as Woody got inside the box. Woody started shuffling the box forward a little, the boogie board oddly staying underneath it. He started off slowly at first, so we started thinking it wasn't going to work at all.

WHOOOOSSSSHHHH!!!!

Woody suddenly took off. He yelled in excitement as he went down the hill. As he reached the bottom, he wasn't slowing down. Topher and I watched as Woody tipped the box over and the boogie board kept going... and slammed into a dumpster at the bottom of the hill. He quickly got up, grabbed the box and the boogie board, and ran back up the hill.

"It was awesome! I had to bail at the end, because I was going to hit the dumpster, but it was great! You need to go."

So we set everything back up, a few feet to the right so he wouldn't have to worry about hitting the dumpster, and Topher climbed inside the box.

WHOOOOSSSSHHHH!!!!

Topher went down the hill just as quickly as Woody. He went a few feet into the parking lot before he bailed. He grabbed everything and ran up the hill.

"Dude, that was cool! It's so fast, I probably would have kept going if I wouldn't have bailed to stop."

At that moment, our friend, Carl, called me and asked what we were up to. We told him, and he rushed over. He, too, tried our set up and found himself having fun. I filmed every bit of it, until I ran out of battery. The only problem is that I eventually taped over part of it. Which kinda sucks.

After a few hours of this, we all went back to Topher and Woody's apartment and had hot chocolate to warm up. We all gushed about our fun new activity, and tried to think of a name. As the one who came with the idea itself, I'm proud to say I also came up with the name:

Thus, the Boogie Box was born.