Road Trip Entertainment

Yesterday, my company had a cookout where I wound up trying to help a coworker brainstorm ideas for entertaining kids on road trips. My family went on a lot of road trips when I was little. Up to PEI, to Michigan, down to DC and throughout central Europe. Reading was out of the question because I got car sick. The one time I tried reading on a road trip, my "Anne of Windy Poplars" flew out of the window on a Hungarian highway. My family enjoyed the irony that wind took "Anne of Windy Poplars".

The more I thought about it, I realized that my brother and I didn't really need entertainment on road trips. We just stared out the window to watch the scenery or have fun mentally messing with the skyline (making the clouds mountains or inverting sky and cloud). The radio was always on and sometimes we played the license plate game. The strongest memory of road trips for me was using the upper part of my seatbelt as a cradle for my head, humming as I hypnotized myself by lazily tracking the lines on the highway. For some reason, we got really excited if we saw cows. We'd yell "Moo cows!" and that excitement would wear off as the stench of manure wafted in. The worst smell I ever encountered on a road trip was driving through a paper mill town.

Nowadays, cars have built in DVD players to entertain kids on trips which I think is ridiculous. What is the point of taking a road trip if no one notices the changing scenery? Plus, how is it good for kids to find yet another way to hand them over to the TV babysitter? Also, I doubt the cars with DVD players have good mileage. So in order to entertain your kids, you are ruining their future lives on the planet. I do remember having fights with my brother if he was on my side. We used the middle seatbelt as a line of demarcation. By the time we needed to sleep a little, we'd try to curl up on our side. As long as we asked permission, we could stretch out to sleep. One of us had legs going down and the other could have legs on the seat. I was able to train my bladder through all these trips. Even now, I can joke that I have a "bladder of steel".

Since I was of no help at the work cookout, I got to hear other coworkers road trip entertainment ideas. I really liked all the word game suggestions like Ghost and a mental hangman type game.