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[Asherdan]

[AugustWest]

Three words:

Books

On

Tape

[jay-ell]

We make the twelve-hour drive from Raleigh to Toledo (The Motherland) fairly regularly.  At one point, when I was still a bratty teenager, we went eleven times in a single calendar year.  One thing I've discovered is that you have to balance "alone" time with "together" time.  If everybody's engrossed in their GBA/Discman/book/whatever the whole time, you arrive feeling disconnected and woozy.  If you insist in playing "family car games" the whole time, you hate one another by the time you cross the second state line.  

Books on tape/CD are great because they give you something to talk about but also don't require interaction.  I suggest light, funny selections like "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" or something else that doesn't require absolute concentration.  Personally, I have a problem with being read to, and I can't absorb information as readily that way -- quite the opposite of Pedro in that respect -- so I've found that if the audio selection is too informative, I tend to learn nothing from it.  

Car games:

The Alphabet Game: look for the various letters of the alphabet, in order, on roadside signs, including billboards.   Can be played cooperatively (all players call out letters as they see them) or competitively (players keep track silently, and try to be the first to get to "z" -- not recommended if your spouse cheats at games).  

I Spy: A perennial favorite.  

Backseat Bingo -- not as dirty as it sounds.  Purchase or make bingo cards with common roadside sights -- signs, other cars, even different kinds of roadkill -- and check off the objects as you see them.  My family and I had the cards with the red sliders, and they were awesome.  Unfortunately, the driver usually isn't able to play (safely) unless someone else manages her card.  

A variation on Backseat Bingo is to see how many different states you can find represented on license plates.  The first one to spot a new state gets a point, and the person with the most points at the end of the trip wins.  

If all else fails, down some dramamine and pass out.  Nothing makes time fly like a good afternoon's sleep.  

Bon Voyage!

[side_show]

Calgary?  But that's the asshole of Canada!  

*suspiciously* Are you going to the Calgary stampede?

Also, did you intentionally mis-spell both the city and country? I'm just sayin' if you want to avoid a cavity search 1) spell the country's name right and 2) don't go to Calgary[/i]

[AugustWest]

-- Honey, we need more Calagary!

-- Ancient Chinese secret, huh?

For some reason I'm fixated on bad 70's TV commercials today.

[side_show]

P.S. Is it true what I heard about the moose-es-es up there?

There are moose in Canada.  Not sure what you've heard about them.  They do talk, but mostly in French.  

I once dated a guy whose mother totaled two cars in a row within a couple months buy running into deer.  My grandmother and aunt were killed by driving the car over the frozen innards of a deer left on a road in winter.  Also, one of my coworkers did over $2000 damage to his car by driving into a porcupine.

[CortJstr]

Calgary stampede?

How sad is it that I can't see those two words together without thinking of the Harts?

[wombat]

 Also, one of my coworkers did over $2000 damage to his car by driving into a porcupine.

Please, you must explain further.

[V-Adore]

I spent most of my childhood on long, strange car trips, the record being the driving excursion from Fairbanks, Alaska down the Al-Can to a furthest-south point of Nogales, Mexico.  (I somehow managed not to permanently damage the interior of the car until midway through British Columbia.) A few recommendations:

Books on tape can be good, but do stick to light stuff -- it is basically no fun to be driving down a boring highway only to have to listen to the life of some sort of uninteresting president. If the books are of an unpopular genre or turn out to be not very good, decide beforehand who has the right to mock, and to which degree, lest it turn into a "SHUT UP ABOUT MY TOM CLANCYS OR I'M PULLING THIS CAR OVER" incident.

Rotate music fairly often. Groovy driving mixes are good, but there's only so often you can listen to one CD, especially if it has one really downer song on it that you always have to skip.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ask if a rest stop is required a few miles out from the rest stop; this prevents the "nobody needed that, right? ... right?" effect and prevents any emergency stops at heinous gas-station bathrooms.

Try to figure out beforehand how many miles you want to make per day. This will allow you to better consider whether to stop for a long lunch, go see the world's largest twine ball, &c.

[Choop]

Great topic, wonderful replies.

Books on tape are good, as long as the driver can remain more interested in the road than in the tale. Personal music players are good, and if a laptop is available, charge it up and put a DVD in it for the backseat.

A small cooler stocked with sodas, water, and juice is MANDATORY. This not only guarantees more leg-stretching (as more visits to the greatest nation are required) but also saves money: an 8-pack of Cokes at the grocery store is cheaper than eight singles from a gas station.

A longer-lasting game than Alphabet is Numbers - start at one, everybody keeps their own count and announces each new number. Whoever gets the highest wins -- but that's only half. On the trip back, count backwards from your prior score. Whoever gets back to one first wins the second half!

Another good family-time-type game is Trivial Pursuit; skip the board and just designate a Reader. No rules or points here, the Reader just blurts questions out; the winner of the question picks the next category.

Have a good/safe trip etc.!

[AugustWest]

Another good family-time-type game is Trivial Pursuit; skip the board and just designate a Reader. No rules or points here, the Reader just blurts questions out; the winner of the question picks the next category.

We did this a lot (what a surprise, eh?)  We also had a Password like game where the clue giver had to describe a person and the guesser had to name them.  Fun.

Also played Geography.  I say a place name, next person has to name a place starting with the last letter of the place name (i.e. "Achewood ... Denmark ... Keokuk).  We also did this with food names which was considerably harder.

One time my Dad and I tried to name each of Kentucky's 120 counties and their county seats.  We know how to have fun.

[sailor]

I once drove from WA state to Alaska. With my exGF. Wanna know what is rad about the Alaska Highway?:

 "Well, damn, I ain't seen a cop on the road in three days, and I can see about seven miles ahead of me on this straight-away....so, uh....how fast can a honda civic go? What? No, I wasn't talking to you, go back to sleep."

You also learn to be a very skilled passer. Because of the RV's. They're EVERYWHERE. And they're only doin' like 45mph. I swear i spent half the driving time on the wrong side of the road.

[side_show]

First off, Calgary is the asshole of Canada because it's full of cowboy hat wearing right wingers.  That is not to say that there aren't nice people in Calgary.  Just that the ratio of enjoyable people to not as enjoyable people is not in your favor.  But I'm from "Friendly Manitoba" -as our licence plates read, where, when driving on the prairie total strangers wave at you from their cars as you pass in your car.

 Also, one of my coworkers did over $2000 damage to his car by driving into a porcupine.

Please, you must explain further.

He was on the highway - likely speeding over the 100 km/hr limit.  He tells me the porcupine was very large - like the size of a medium sized dog.  I didn't know porcupines got this big.  When you hit a porcupine it throws its quills.  My coworkers told me that this resulted in his front bumper having many a quill lodged into it so far that they couldn't be removed, that these quills and also the body of the animal dented and scratched a significant portion of his hood and fender, and that parts of the under carriage had to be totally replaced.

[Flenker]

my family took a road trip the summer after I graduated high school, we drove from eastern Iowa to northern California, then up to Portland, Oregon, and back to Iowa.  We played the license plate game, and actually got every state but one, and I believe it was Virginia.

My brother and I also brought a deck of cards and played a variety of games, and I did a lot of reading.  I only drove for a few hours, through most of Nebraska, and that was enough for me.

[V-Adore]

my family took a road trip the summer after I graduated high school, we drove from eastern Iowa to northern California, then up to Portland, Oregon, and back to Iowa.  We played the license plate game, and actually got every state but one, and I believe it was Virginia.

The license plate game is a lot of fun, but the bloom was a bit off the rose for me since I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska; for those who haven't been there, it's enough of a tourist hub in the summer that you can easily play the license plate game and rack up an impressive score without leaving the parking lot. (The favorite was the Fred Meyer parking lot, which offered electric plug-ins and thus got a staggering array of squatter RVs.)

I was in Calgary once and recall it being a decent place. However, I was about 11, and my only real memory of the place was the avant-garde hotel we stayed at, which featured an impressive indoor pool area and a kidney-shaped pool. How could you go wrong?