Comments on: Peace, Love and Road Trips

By: AJ

AJ — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:27:29 +0000

My family takes many road trips, so we have a big load of traveling games. One of the simplest and most popular is the “Meow” game (though, as a warning, this CAN get anoying). The kids take turns singing the tunes of songs- only instead of saying the actually lyrics they sing the word “Meow”. The other players then guess which song it is, and the first one to guess it goes next.

The next one sounds trippy, but believe it or not its insanely popular and gets pretty hilarious. We call this one Telepathy, and its game play is similar to the board game “Apples to Apples”. One person is the “transmitter” the others the “receivers”. The transmitter closes her eyes (unless she’s driving!) and visualizes something in her mind. When the image is fixed she tells the others “Transmitting!” She then pretends to send out “psychic waves” to the other players, who then try to recieve them by visualizing things in their heads. When they have “recieved” the “transmissions” the recievers take turns describing what they visualized. The transmitter then explains what she was visualizing, and chooses the reciever whose “vision” was closest to hers. That person gets to be the next transmitter. This game relies heavily on hamming it up, and really getting into acting the part. Close your eyes and press your fingers to your temples. Say “Ohm….Ohm…” under your breath. When you describe your vision go for the theatrical- rather than saying you saw a pony in a field say you “imagined a great white stallion galloping through a mystic forest” or better yet, “I saw a great pegasus flying through a field of stars”. When the “transmitters” describe what they saw to you exclaim that it is “Very interesting” in a shocked tone of voice- as if they pulled the thoughts right out of your head.

I met a group of teenagers from Hong Kong recently who taught me a game commonly played there called “Ping! Pong! Wah!” that is great for car trips. The game play is pretty simple. players use their fingers to shape a gun, pointing at each other and calling “ping” “pong” or else pointing at the ceiling and calling “bang!” If some one points at you and says “Ping!” it simply becomes your turn to point at somebody else. If they shout “Pong!” you must throw your hands up in the air and shout “Wah!”. If, however, a player points her finger in the air and and shouts “bang!” all players must shout “wah!” and duck. This game doesn’t follow a particular order- you can chose to point at whoever you want- and it goes rather rapidly. The point is to pay attention so that you respond appropriately. I like this game because it isn’t especially competitive- nobody actually wins it, so no fights break out.

By: cool

cool — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:45:02 +0000

cool car

By: Jennie

Jennie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:08:04 +0000

If your kids can read very well, we always play the license plate game, where you have to make a word out of the letters in a license plate on the car in front of you. They have to remain in the same order. Example:

302 DVN

You could make divine, adventure, divan. You get the idea. Whoever makes the longest word wins. We still play it even when we are just driving around town.

By: mormonhermitmom

mormonhermitmom — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:28:35 +0000

If you can manage individual CD players with headphones for each kid so they can listen to their own music/audiobooks, it may save you some noise stress. Our last two day roadtrip had one portable DVD player, and two little “videonow” machines that played small videodiscs, though I don’t think they make those anymore. They took turns passing them around. My oldest packed books with her. I don’t know how she did that because I always got carsick when I read in the car.

By: Gabrielle

Gabrielle — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:56:09 +0000

Another plug for audio books. We recently took a 3-week, 11-state road trip with my 7 year old twins and my 5 year old, and listened to audio books the whole way. It was an awesome trip.
Get an account with audible.com, there are thousands and thousands of awesome audio books out there.
Harry Potter, Inkheart trilogy, Bartimeus trilogy, Peter and the Starcatchers trilogy, Percy Jackson series, Redwall series, the list goes on and on of the audio books we have listened to and loved. My husband and I love them as much as our boys.
We took a trip with a DVD player one time, and my kids watched for a while, but soon got grumpy and irritable. The audio books keep them happy and occupied, but still engaged in what is happening outside of the car windows.

By: Heidi Barton

Heidi Barton — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:43:31 +0000

I didn’t take time to read all the above comments, so this might be a repeat, but my mom (mother of 11 wild indians) had to keep all of us sane in a big van without the modern TV… One thing she did (that we LOVE) was made “car kits” for each of us. It was fairly individualized, but we all got a few fun things…a new coloring book, a new doll (think dollar-store qaulity) or some other small play thing. It was SO fun to get “new” things, and when we got bored, we switched. Anyway, that was something I loved growing up…I still remember some of the specific things I got on different trips.

By: Faith.Not.Fear

Faith.Not.Fear — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:29:25 +0000

Time must fade things ‘cuz I don’t have any bad memories of car trips (I know stuff happened — just can’t remember it!).
We’re definitely grateful for the in-car DVD player — we used to velcro a small TV/VCR to the arms of the front seat — the things we do to survive!
Getting a new movie or bringing a couple that you haven’t watched for a while works best.
Starting out way early helps, too — the kids sleep for half the time .
Finding a park or interesting stopping point to let everyone eat, use the restroom & get the wiggles out buys you some more time.
Sadly, having the big kids need to stay home or be on missions makes less crowding, less fighting — and a tender-hearted mom ! Sigh!

By: La Yen

La Yen — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:46:14 +0000

My mom is still angry that I hid (and then destroyed) The Hobbit audio tapes. But if I had to hear them one more time I would have killed someone.

By: wendy

wendy — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:45:18 +0000

I was trying to figure out “punch buggy,” when I remembered we did “slug bug.” Only we didn’t have any rules–we also didn’t think to punch back, though!

I loved travel bingo as a kid, and we loved Mom reading The Hobbit to us.

OH, and we really really loved singing silly songs together.

By: Karyn

Karyn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:08:30 +0000

Audio books, definitely! We like the short stories, especially ghost stories. Sometimes we check out books about where we’re headed and read them out loud, too. Bring a pair of binoculars and let the kids take turns looking for wildlife. We got a National Audubon book about wildlife, plants, and rocks of the Southwestern states-it’s fun to see what we can identify. Have a great trip!