My BF will potentially soon be trekking from Boston to Chicago in a rental car for a business trip.
His companions will be three or four co-workers who are fun people. They range in age from 23 to 55. They are part of a close-knit department, and have worked together for years.
They enjoy silliness.
I will be putting together some goodie-bags for them, with snacks and toys and other things to keep them occupied while driving along.
So far I have decided they’ll need:
Candy
Nuts
Trail Mix
Some baked goods
Interstate Bingo cards
Something small to unwrap every now and again.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Any ideas, especially for stuff that the driver can join in on without running them off the road?
One of my favorites is “I’m going on a …” I’m sure it has a real name but the way it’s played is you pick a subject and each person has to state what they are bringing and repeat all the other’s choices in alphbetical order.
Subject: relatives
I’m going to a family reunion and I’m bringing Aunt Martha
I’m…briging Babe, and Aunt Martha
The more bizzare the better
I’m fond of going to Hell (aesbestos suit, bottled water, …)
By which I mean, you go along and try to spot the letters of the alphabet in consecutive order on things outside the car (signs, billboards, other cars’ license plates, etc.). First person to make it to Z wins. Q’s are difficult, as are V’s. X’s aren’t (all those eXit signs)
I think the “average” time to play this game is about an hour.
Also, there are numerous variations, such as doing numbers, going backwards, only using license plates. Anything really. It’s a good diversion.
If they can all agree, then books on tape are great ways to pass time. For long trips Garrison Keillor is my favorite, though I hear the Lord of the Rings is fun.
The car gets divided up into two teams: everyone on the right side and everyone on the left side.
When you see cows on your side of the car (Actually out the window on your side. If your have cows in the car with you, you shouldn’t be playing games.) your team can start counting (one cow, two cows, three cows…) untill the other team calls out “Rustlers!”. Then you stop counting the cows. At the next group of cows, you count continues from where you left off. Both teams try to count as many cows as they can.
When you pass a cemetary, whoever’s side it’s on has to call out “Milkshake!” before the other team says “Your cows are dead!”. If your cows are dead, your cow count starts back at one cow at the next herd.
Whichever team has the least amount of cows at a meal stop has to buy.
Another Less Fun Game
Corn / Not Corn
As you drive by farm fields and there’s corn growing there, you yell “Corn!”. If it’s anything else you yell “Not corn!”. And you point out the windows like a big doof.
When I was little my family had a counting game for long car trips. One person would be “it” and would pick something to count, like flags (but of course not tell anyone). They would start counting every time they would see one and all the others would have to guess what it was being counted. The driver could also play, maybe not as well but my mom was usually good at guessing.
I really love this game. Used to play it on long drives across Texas. Q is quite a sticker, but everyone knows that there has to be a Dairy Queen somewhere. The funniest part is when you’re stuck on, say, O for some reason, and you see the Dairy Queen come and go… lol, it’s so painful.
Hey, We play this game too. Or at least a variant of it. In Sweden we call it Ko-pingis (Cow Ping Pong). We play it as follows. Choose sides and start counting cows. 21 cows are a set and the game is played best of five or more sets. We do not use graveyards instead horses on your side resets the score to zero.
My family had this game for long car trips: When you’re overtaking another car, everyone tries to guess if the driver is a man or a woman based solely on what the car looks like. You can check if you’re right when you pass.
There’s also the classic “Slug Bug”. The first person to see a VW Beetle shouts “Slug Bug” followed by it’s colour (so if it’s blue, you’d shout “Slug Bug Blue!”), then punch the person sitting next to them. Whether or not the new Beetle counts as a sluggable car is a subject of great debate, and should be set down in ground rules beforehand.
The game that Rue DeDay and Coil mentioned is one we used to play as a kid. The difference was that we counted white horses on our side and the cemetary rule was that you had to start all over on your side. This was before interstate highways and when some plowing was still done by horse.
My kids used to count VW’s, but again there aren’t near as many of them, today.
My mother had a list of things for us to find. The hardest thing to find was a man with a beard. Again that has changed.
My brothers and sisters and I enjoyed a car game we called “Not Move a Muscle”. You need at least three people in the back seat, and the rules are, well, don’t use your muscles to keep you upright. Helps if you have a fun dad like we did – he’d exaggerate the curves and turns, forcing “piggy piles” of kids, with a squished-up little sister begging, “turn left, Dad, please?”, and he’d occasionally slam on the brakes, dumping us all on the floor, where we’d have to stay until… hmm… when? I can’t remember. Maybe whenever mom felt sorry for us and called a time-out. Great game, now ruined by seat belt laws.
Sometimes, when we were in a town with stoplights, Dad also played a game with no name (I thought of it as “Not Gonna Stop”). He’d see a red, and slow down to a crawl, and we’d all hope it turned green before he hit the car in front of him, because the rule was that he could NOT come to a complete stop. Once he even bumper-nudged the leading car.
We played a license plate game where you take the 3 letters on a license plate as you pass/are passed by other cars. Pad them out to make a word–the first letter is the first in the word, the last letter is the last, and the middle letter is in between. Bonus point for coming up with a 4-letter word; bonus point for putting the middle letter in the exact center of the word. So, BLH would become Blah or Belch, both getting bonus points.
Take turns reading out of a good book (one that’s short enough to be finished during the trip, or, say, a Dave Barry or Tom Bodett book, which you can end at the end of any chapter). I once survived a 14-hour night drive (Oregon to L.A.) by reading ‘Robinson Crusoe’ to my husband.
By the way, don’t pick ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Some of the sentences are a whole page long, and I’d have to scan them first to figure out how to make sense of them verbally. It could scar you for life, as it has me, forever doomed to guilt-free use of an overload of commas, semi-colons, and parentheses. (Oh! Actually, it hasn’t doomed me – just the poor souls reading my ramblings.)
Ethilrist,
That sounds like a great game! I’m surprised that there’s a game involving license plates that I didn’t already know! Thanks. So, does Belch get two bonus points (at least 4 letters plus center-of-word), or three (2 ‘extra letters’, one of which is center-of-word)?
-Sue
Ethilrist,
That sounds like a great game! I’m surprised that there’s a game involving license plates that I didn’t already know! Thanks. So, does Belch get two bonus points (at least 4 letters plus center-of-word), or three (2 ‘extra letters’, one of which is center-of-word)?
-Sue
Other games:
U-Haul - you get a point for spotting the truck first. Trailers are 1/2 point.
The licence plate game - we just had to come up with a word out of the 3-letter combo, tho it usually had to start with the first letter. The longer the word, the better.
