Road Games

I love a good road trip now and then, and my children do as well. It's always an adventure, even if the destination is someplace we've been before. The subject of road trips came up recently, more particularly the subject of avoiding boredom on a road trip. Years ago, my brother joined me on a road trip that spanned southern Arizona and southern New Mexico. At one point he began to keep a 'journal' of road kill. Pavement pizza, if you will. The journal read something like this:

3:10 p.m., November 11th, 1986, great tufts of fur sprouting from the pavement in the right-hand, southbound lane of I-10. The next entry was perhaps a deer pizza, bunny biscuits, or some other flattened beast.

When the girls and I travel we, a) bring stuff to entertain ourselves or, b) make up games to entertain ourselves. When all else fails there's always sleep. Well, unless you are driving. At any rate, my girls are old enough to be good at road trips. The first couple of hours aren't a problem: music, sleep, nintendo, toys, conversation. It's after those first hours, and especially as more time goes by, that things get difficult. Counting games are always good. Sometimes we count how many times we hear a particular song during our drive, like Poker Face, by Lady Gaga (if you are young or have teens you know this song). A few years ago we were driving through a particular county in Mississippi and we kept seeing red trucks. Everywhere. So we began counting red trucks. We stopped counting after 200. Seems everyone in southern Mississippi had a red truck. After that we always referred to that region as Red Truck Country.

Sometimes things get downright interesting. In the not-too-distant past one of my daughters brought a couple of beanie babies along. She also brought some clothes for them to wear and various accessories. You haven't lived until you've seen cross dressed beanie babies taking part in a shotgun wedding. Ahem. Yeah, that'll make time fly!

On our most recent trip the girls and I invented a new game which we simply refer to as, "The Cat". I don't know how it even started but the idea is that one person begins by making a statement involving 'The Cat', and then each of us takes turns coming up with new 'things' regarding 'The Cat'. The statements can be random or can be linked by a common thread, such as the cat's emotional state: 'The Cat' is sad, perturbed, elated etc; or each statement has to use a verb: 'The Cat' is jumping, playing parcheesi, eating kibble etc. Eventually 'The Cat' became unstable and condensed, and there was a deflagration. Of course the statements become more ridiculous as you go, with each person trying to think of something more obtuse than the last. The game went on for over an hour. I don't know how we thought of so many statements to make about 'The Cat', but we did.

How about you? Got any road games?

By the way, how do you wake up Lady Gaga? Poker face....

Hobo Joe, Mutant Killer Veggies and Baby-Love

My daughters and I just got back from a trip up to Virginia for a family gathering. While we were away my daughter's boyfriend looked after our cats, so we wanted to do something nice for him in return. We pulled off I-95 at Walterboro, S.C. for the night and the next morning we headed to breakfast at the nearby Waffle House. Just across from us was this:
What better gift to give her boyfriend than a bag full of fireworks? This shop was great: there was a video running that shows you what all the bigger rockets look like so you know what you're getting, and the owner was very helpful, with detailed descriptions and recommendations - sometimes steering us to less expensive things that he thought we'd enjoy more than some we had chosen. He even threw in a few freebies. It helps that this was a Friday morning and we were the only customers in the store. Did I mention that it was quite hot out and that his storefront provided great shade for me to park in while we had breakfast? Yeah, we like Hobo Joe's. (Special thanks to Lance McCord for sharing this photo on Flickr).

After our Fireworks shopping spree we took a side trip down to Charleston, S.C. I wanted to take a break from Interstate driving and scout out Charleston for a future trip. On our way out of Charleston we came across this building:
Looks like a lovely place doesn't it? What caught my eye and had us laughing was the sign in front of the building (you know, the sign I didn't get a picture of...) We were short on time and I didn't turn back to get a photo, so I found this one online when we got home. This is the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory. That's right - a lab for veggies. You know what that means - Mutant Killer Veggies!!

"The mission of the Laboratory since its beginning has been to obtain, through fundamental research, basic information requisite to efficient and orderly breeding of improved vegetable crops for the southern region, and to produce new and improved vegetable cultivars and breeding stocks."

Sure, that's what they want you to think. I bet they're working on some of the greatest biological weapons ever! Things like beets that live up to their name. Artichoke grenades. Water-board-melons. Ears of corn that eavesdrop while the eyes of your potatoes spy on you! Yeah, we had fun with that one for several miles. Anything to liven up a long road trip.

The rest of the drive home was filled with my daughter's sighs and exclamations of how much she missed her boyfriend. You know, the guy she said would miss her more than she would miss him while we were away... Yeah. She has a lot of ooey-gooey nicknames for him. One of her favorites is Baby-Love. The sighing and fretting went like this, "Awwwwww, I miss my Baby-Love!" Repeat that, or a variation of it, every few miles and you too can relive the experience! Occasionally she would doze off and give me a break.

Baby-Love was going to take her out to dinner when we arrived home. Except that life has a way of getting in the way of big plans. Like us taking longer than expected in Charleston, and road construction slow downs. Then things got worse: Baby-Love's grandmother fell and sustained a head injury and he and his dad were possibly going to leave before we arrived back in town. This led to much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth by my daughter. Ok, not really but sort of...Anyhow, this certainly led to more texting and calling. So much so that my phone started ringing because my daughter's battery was dying. How convenient that she told him to call/text my phone. Luckily the grandmother is expected to recover. Unluckily, we arrived home too late for dinner out. Not to worry though, they are dining out tonight. My daughter and Baby-Love will still have to endure the agony of separation though, as he is leaving tomorrow for a week. I say it's good for them to have some time apart.

Oh, and he loves the fireworks...beats a T-shirt any day. You know, the one that says, "My girlfriend went on vacation and all I got was this lousy shirt . . . and cat duty."