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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

childhood car games


I was thinking the other day about road trips. And as I often do, I started reminiscing about all the ridiculous games I used to play. Let's examine a few of them:
  • the 50 states license plate game - fairy self-explanatory. you made a list of the 50 states and tried to find a license plate (or two) from each state. If you got Alaska you were pretty much guaranteed a win, if you saw Hawaii you were dubbed "best ever" for the rest of the trip and no matter what else happened on vacation you were on cloud 9.
  • draw every toy you own game: this wasn't so much a game as it was me drawing everything i brought with me on vacation with a color pencil in a tiny notebook. i have many detailed drawings of my cabbage patch doll
  • see which sibling can push the cooler in the middle seat further game: this was a challenging game because you had to play without the parents knowing you were playing...typically the loser was the one who fell asleep first and couldn't hold their own.
  • drown out mom and dad's audio book with your discman game: i listened to 100% Dance so loud I probably caused long-term ear damage in order to drown out the latest John Grisham book in 8th grade.
  • yarn octopus game: this is only entertaining for about 8 and a half minutes. you wind yarn endlessly around the biggest book you happen to have in the car. die like 18 different strands of yarn around it in various places and...ta da!...you have a yarn octopus. 
  • 20 questions (with dad's impossible items) game: 20 questions was only fun as a child until my dad got to pick an item. Then it was torture. he would just find the most obscure item in the car and then it would take us about 83 questions to realize that he had picked his right sock. 
  • read a book until you vomit game: I always won at this one. Particularly on the windy roads of Glacier National Park while wearing a turtleneck sweater. 
These were how I passed about 1500 hours in the car as a child. What did you do?

3 comments:

Sarah Rutledge said...

bahahahaha. this should be called "an ode to all the kids who went on days-long car rides instead of flying". and the vomiting after reading part? so did that in glacier once

Matt said...

We played a game involving billboards, but now I can't remember how it went. There was also the "beat the crap out of your siblings game", and the rules were pretty similar to the name.

I second the effects of reading in a moving vehicle. I've never thrown up, but it makes me extremely nauseous.

Seth said...

We played license plate games...in alphabetical order. My mom was intense. And gameboys were just as bad trying to play in the car. That got me nauseous.