Road trip!
Next week, as I’ve mentioned, John and I will be headed to Colorado to soak up the sub-90 temperatures and bone-dry air. It’s gonna be grrrrrreat.
But getting to those mountains requires a twenty-hour drive, a hearty chunk of which is through the Great Plains of Texas. If you’ve never driven across Texas before, you may find this hard to comprehend, but there’s heckuva lotta Texas in Texas. We plan to leave early Saturday morning and will probably spend Saturday night somewhere in the Panhandle. That’s one full day of driving, in one direction, without hitting a state border. Or civilization, for the most part.
While the boy and I do get along rather well, twenty hours of conversation with anyone, with no environmental stimulation besides the tumbleweed and the occasional license plate, is nigh-impossible to achieve without heads exploding. This is where y’all come in.
I need entertainment. It must be portable, clean, and inexpensive. Books, of course, are ideal, as are audio files. I have at least one book I plan to bring along, plus a couple of my textbooks from this summer (they’re interesting, damnit!). I’m also going to download a bunch of podcasts to my iPod, starting with these, which I hear are superfantastic.
None of the other unread books on my bookshelf grab me, though, and I haven’t been keeping up with podcasts that well ever since I decided that my iTrip was unusable in the city. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery? Books you think I might enjoy and/or get something useful out of?
Or do you have any favorite car games to recommend? I’m partial to the alphabet game*, where you find letters on road signs, and my family usually plays Twenty Questions. My brother and I also used to play that one game—Ghost, maybe?—in which you take turns naming letters, trying not to spell a word.
Oooh boy I love road trips. Fun fun fun. I feel as though the time I’m guaranteed not to able to distract myself with the shiny, shiny internet is precious, and I should put every minute of it to good use. Or is that not in the spirit of vacation? Maybe I’ll say I should put every minute of it to FUN use. There we go, that’s generic enough. Vacation!
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* John and I have not discussed the alphabet game yet; I’ll play alone if he’s not interested. That’s how cool I am.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
20 questions with you and the boy…that could be interesting. Truth or Dare too? Paul and I read Tyranasaur Canyon on our drives lately…fun to laugh at the bad bad bad writting. Paul is looking up dirty books on audio for ya…ummmm yeah. (www.audible.com)
August 7th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Where in CO?
August 7th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Keystone.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Grabbing a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards can be handy, or a deck from Taboo. Bit harder to play competitively in that format, but helps pass the time. Also decks are relatively travel sized. This of course works best when someone already owns the game. And do you guys know anyone with books on tape/CD?
Map game: Start with one destination. Next person comes up with a another destination that starts with the last letter of the previous answer. Denmark –> Kansas –> San Antonio –> Oman … etc. Make it as inclusive as you want. Just countries, or include capital cities, or include states/provinces. First person who gets stuck loses.
Word game: First person thinks of a word, says the first letter from that word. Second person thinks of a word that starts with that letter, says the second letter. Play goes back and forth until someone loses by a) ending the word b) bluffs and gets called on their bluff or c) calls someone on a bluff and it turns out to be a real word. Because of the a) rule, some words, like catastrophic can’t come into play, because someone would lose when they said t for “cat.”
August 8th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Ooh, yeah, we used to play the map game, too. And the word game is the “ghost” one I was talking about. Yay car games!
August 8th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
just try to be comfortable with silence, eh? My sweetie and I will go hours without talking on long car rides - it’s lovely. Bring lots of good music or even an audiobook that you both might like. have fun!