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Spring is coming. Time for a lengthy road trip in a classic car. That's what The Thaw is all about.

It is said that out of the mouths of babes comes truth and wisdom; I'm here to tell you the gospel sounds best coming from the side pipes of a 1966 427 Cobra as it drops into third and hammers past. Locked in January's cold embrace, it's just the memory to warm the cockles of your heart. Spring is coming, and with it, The Thaw.

Doubtless you've already made your to-do list for 2018, but add this item to it: Get yourself a classic car—any classic car—and hit the road this year. I get it, you're busy. I am too. I've got no money and two kids. Somedays, I wish I had no kids and two money.

But I always manage to make room for The Thaw. When the days are short, when the roads are salted, when the year ahead looks less like an opportunity and more like a burden to be shouldered, The Thaw keeps the truth in perspective. The only thing standing between you and an epic drive is the willingness to turn off Netflix and go fire up Google Maps and look for the wiggly bits.

The Hagerty Spring Thaw is the brainchild of Dave Hord and Warwick Patterson, one that rattled loose during a classic VW rally to Las Vegas. The idea is simple: A budget-minded medium-distance rally through British Columbia held in April or May. Owners have a chance to sort out their winter's wrenching on the road with a little company, should something break. Driving around in old cars, something always breaks.

You do not need a Cobra. Our convoy on the 2017 run, passing and re-passing each other, included a Datsun 240Z, a Porsche 356C, a first-generation Toyota MR2, an MGA, and an NB-chassis Miata that everyone pretended was an Alfa-Romeo (which had broken before we set off). Also, my father and I in our 1967 MGB which had behaved quite faithfully, only once developing a bizarre vacuum issue that sucked three-quarters of the oil out of the sump and blew it through the engine and out the tailpipe don't ask me any more questions British cars we brought duct tape.

If you've ever been to the Pebble Beach concours, you are aware that there exists considerable reverence for the vintage car as a revered objet d'art. Grass is carefully picked from tire treads, paint is buffed to silver-platter sheen, and lots of people wearing silly hats stand around drinking champagne and looking at cars not going anywhere.

The Thaw, and any event like it, is the antidote to this sort of stuffy exclusivity. At Pebble, the only time people from all walks of life are present is if some poors have accidentally wandered onto the golf course, moments before someone yells “release the hounds!” Riff-raff are not allowed.

At the end of a long day on the road, hanging around a parking lot with a tallboy of warmish Old Speckled Hen tucked in a paper bag, I can assure you that riff-raff have all the fun. With nearly a hundred cars on the move (including the support crew), the rag-tag mob of gearheads that makes up the Thaw is as varied as their machines.

There's Phil and Calye Lacefield, and their son Chance, who has attended the event every year he's been alive. Their '66 Saab 96 has an 850cc two-stroke that occasionally spews smoke like an industrial mosquito fogger on cold starts, and is mentioned in the route book—there's a warning on a steep downhill to watch your rearview for free-wheeling Swedes with no engine braking.

Dave Graham and his father Rob are first-timers, and even in the company of Caterhams and Corvettes, their 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 draws a crowd. Dave's set the car to the ride height Colin Chapman intended when he consulted on the DMC, and the stainless-steel wedge snaps necks the whole route.

The Trinders—brothers Scott and Adam and father Bob—have brought along a rally-prepped 1970 240Z and a 1990 Japan-market Mini with a motorcycle engine mounted amidships. We've met the madcap Mini before, and if anything it's only gotten louder.

Helen Poon is in her twenties and drives a 1938 MG TD while wearing a leather flying helmet. Harry and Dave Watson wear full foul-weather gear as they pilot their Mini Moke through the sweeping rainstorms, looking like a cross between Deadliest Catch and a Shriner parade; Dave is famous for once jumping a mountain bike over the Tour de France. Paul Silva, a diminutive mechanical genius with a past racing tiny French buzz boxes at the now-defunct Westwood circuit, whips his 1970 Renault R8 Gordini along with the furious enthusiasm of Inspector Clouseau karate-fighting Cato.

It is a Mos Eisley's worth of characters, from those who love the stories behind the genteel marques to a tech worker who needed to blow off coding frustrations by wrenching on the purely mechanical guts of a Rover 3500S. It's basically everything good about the Cars and Coffee movement served up in a travel mug. There are cliques here for sure—the Mini owners often dress up like lunatics—but there are no hard lines to be found. Jaguar E-Types rub shoulders with the world's crustiest Studebaker Champion, a borrowed and dilapidated Saab 900 turbo farts along behind a colossal 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III, and two young guys with RUF'd 911s chat with a gent who's owned his Morgan Plus 4 for nearly four decades.

Almost nothing goes as planned. An avalanche forces a detour of more than a hundred miles; mass flooding in BC's interior requires further re-routing, and shifting heavy rains are soon joined by freakish snow flurries. On the first day, Hord's 210hp rally-tribute Super Beetle loses its fuel system. On the last day, a Pantera GTS lunches a rear wheel bearing.

But, incredibly, everyone else makes it. Over the three days, the group covers more than a thousand miles of BC backroads, which would be nothing to a V6 Camry, but is fairly energetic when you have 1.8 litres of British Leyland indifference and a four-speed manual with no overdrive.

Now entering its eighth year, the Thaw is successful enough to have spawned an entire company. Classic Car Adventures puts on events of varying sizes in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Toronto. Further, many participants in The Thaw use the event as a springboard to set out on other, perhaps even longer tours throughout the year. Our convoy-mates in the Cobra and the soon-repaired Pantera GTS soon after headed south towards the Oregon coast and looped back into Montana, covering thousands of miles.

All the way they went, they left the truth echoing behind them. No matter the cost or the cylinder count, classic cars weren't built to sit there and be looked at. Build them, break them, fix them again, but above all else get out there and drive them. Spring's coming. Get out your maps and plant the seeds for something epic.