When we were young, my folks often took us for day trips on the weekends. We went to places in town; it seems like the art and natural history museums and the aquarium were popular spots because I recall them so well. We probably went to each one several times a year. I’ll try to write about those trips another day.
We also went on long drives. My mom loved to go riding out of the city to watch the countryside roll by. Later on, as an adult, I wondered about that: my dad was a traveling salesman and drove all week long, but I never heard him begrudge my mom these outings and he did all the driving. On some of the trips we we stopped and saw interesting sites or went to roadside farm stands, but other times we would just drive for a few hours and then turn around and toodle on back home.
Anyway, we played spoken games while motoring along. Sometimes just us kids, and other times my folks would join in, too. There was the standard license plate game, trying to see how many different states’ plates we could spot. My dad was good at that one; I think he might have played it solo while driving around during the week. He always knew what all the other states’ plates looked like. It was easier back then; each state only had one style of plate for most cars, though many states changed their lettering and background colors each year.
And there was the geography game: first player names a geographic location, then the next person has to come up with one that starts with the last letter of the previous place, and so on. I think we allowed any geographic name—cities, states, countries, provinces, and also rivers, oceans, mountains, and so on—but restrictions could be added. Sure loved that game. My sister and I studied up for it for a while, looking up interesting town names on world maps. We probably started doing that to learn names of places that start with A, and don’t end with A. A lot of place names that start with A end with it, or at least a lot of the ones we knew then. Plus it seems to me that a lot of other places that didn’t start with A still ended with it, so it was easy to get stuck in the A’s. I don’t recall many of the interesting names we learned any longer, except that I will always remember that there’s a town in Australia called Humpty Doo. We played other games in the car, too, or just fooled around sometimes, but the geography game was a biggie and we often returned to it.
I don’t play it any longer. Hmm, I should; I could use a prod to brush up on geography. I still like spoken games, though. I tend towards trivia games nowaday, often about movies. These are spontaneous, started because of some mention of a movie or actor or maybe someone says a line from a film and then a chain of challenges might start. Or a topic just comes up and we see how many films we can name to fit it. I’m not sure everyone would call these games; maybe they’re really just discussions. But even so, they’re fun discussions and they feel like games to me. And they sometimes come up during car trips, too. :-)
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