Gadling

I spent the last 5 days driving across the Canadian prairies with my friend Sarah. We drove about 2800 km in total (about 1740 miles for you non-metrics), entertained only by a few CDs randomly chucked into the car in haste, one gossip magazine and about 50 country music stations per town. Oh, and a few road trip games made up for such purposes, such as:

Cows: My friend Alissa taught me this. Whenever you pass a field of cows, you yell cows and quickly count the number of cows in the field, to a maximum of 17.You can then bank that number of cows and at the end of the trip, the person with the most cows wins. The catch is cemeteries. If one of your opponents sees a cemetery, they can get rid of all of your cows by yelling cemetery! It’s pretty thrilling when you’re surrounded by pretty much nothing but cows. Though don’t play it on a bus — people will think you’re strange for being so happy to see a cemetery.

License plate: The object of this game is to make the best word or phrase out of the letters on a license plate. For example, a plate that reads JXT 986 could be Juxtaposition 983! (with exclamation mark because you must yell it out.) Or UKJ 123 could be Ukulele Jingle or Yukon Jack 123! The judging part can be a bit tricky, but I guess there are no real winners — it’s about bringing creativity to the car.

Cars: Each person picks a color. Say you pick Blue and your opponent picks white. You count the blue cars that you see, and your opponent counts the white cars. Whoever gets to, say, 15 first wins. Yay!

You know, when you write them down, they sound pretty dull. Here’s a list of some more interesting games that I will bring next time I spend so much time in the car.