Three Travel Games for the Kids
If your childhood was anything like mine there was a lot of time spent in the car. Every second of a car trip felt like an eternity and more than once my father had to yell out “do you want me to pull this car over?” We all get angry sometimes, but I think a key to making the ride more enjoyable for both parents and children is finding activities that will occupy everyone. My wife has recently purchased the Usborne Activity Cards to help us keep the kids entertained on car trips. Three of my favorite activities are listed below.
Hungry Alphabet- Someone starts by saying “I am so hungry I could eat an avocado.” The next person repeats the same “I am so hungry” and throws out something that starts with a B. To make the game harder you can have the second person first repeat the A word before adding their B word. People that don’t recite the list prior to contributing are eliminated. The forth person to go for instance would say “I am so hungry I could eat an avocado, banana, chocolate cake, and a date. There are hundreds of variations to this game like if you are going camping what would you bring, if you had a party who would you invite, etc. Before you start you should exclude letters like q and x since they are really hard to use.
Blue Car, Red Car- Each player picks a vehicle color and once everyone agrees on colors the game begins. Each car that you pass is a point for whichever person picked that color. The first person to count to a predetermined number wins. I have found this game works great on a two lane road where everyone sees the cars approaching so keeping track of the score is easy. A line of cars approaching is especially fun. We frequently play this game on the Mt. Rose Highway between Lake Tahoe and Reno. With so many variations of greens, blues and other colors there are always fun disputes. The best part about it is that your you have no advantage over your kids unless you talk your child into selecting pink or some other strange color.
ABC Spotting- I have been playing this game since I was a kid. The best part of this game is you can all work as a team. The idea is that you start on the letter A. Your group needs to find the letter A on a street sign before proceeding onto the letter B. Billboards are generally very helpful for locating most of the letters. We play this game whenever we hit the highway. We try to find all of the letters before we exit or we all lose. A variation is starting with 1 and counting to twenty. We have to mix it up since after a while you will remember where key letters like Q can be found.
