Road Tripping

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m taking asparagus, broccoli, carrots…

Yeah, right.

You know I’m really taking angel food cake, Bacardi, candy…

But usually I’m playing the game with my kids, and I want to make sure I’m leaving a good impression about vegetables instead of candy and other things I would ordinarily bring on an adult-type picnic. These are the types of games we play in the car on road trips, or at least they were until technology interfered. Or, I should say, until I let technology interfere. That’s the glory of road trips. We can go old school if we want, just to remind ourselves of how the days of yore went by.

My dad used to be the designated driver on those early road trips, with my mom riding shotgun. My sister and I would be in the back playing the license plate game, or even the waving game. I was horrible at both, for completely different reasons. If you’ve never played the license plate game, well, first I feel sorry for you, and secondly, it was a blast, and easy too. You see, the point of the game was to see how many states you could find while driving the interstate. My sister was better than me at it because I have always been easily distracted. After seeing the umpteenth “Pennsylvania” plate I would start thinking about other things, and I would inevitably miss the “Virginia,” “Delaware,” and “California” plates that would come in quick succession.

The waving game was all about likeability, but I still think my sister won every time simply because she was a girl. The object of the game was to wave at all the passing motorists and their passengers, and if someone waved back you got a point. Two points for getting a tractor trailer driver to toot at your insistence. Every once in a while I could get someone to wave back at me, but I imagine my smile was a little creepy to people. Joy was so much easier at it, pretending to know the people we passed. And she never gave up too. Just like with the license plate game, I would get easily distracted while waving too.

Then my dad would take over and we would sing “How much is that doggy in the window?” often off-key and sounding like wounded dogs ourselves, but at least we did it as a family. I recall travelling to the Magic Kingdom for the last time as a family, and how lame the whole ride seemed then, but looking back on it I realize how much I missed that until I had a family of my own. Now I relive all of those road trips through rose-tinted shades, back when we only had the radio, and it phased in and out as we traveled from state to state, to distract us from ourselves.

We would stay at the most hideous motels (if you went there with a black light, you would be scrubbing yourself in a tub for years afterwards) because they were cheap. And we would only be at each one long enough to get a night’s sleep, then we were out pre-dawn for another round of road songs interrupted by silences when there was nothing else to sing or to say. But we were a family, and I took that all for granted, until we weren’t anymore, until it was too late.

Now when we get on the road, I’m the one driving and leading us in a rousing version of “How much is that doggy in the window?” or its updated version, “Who let the dogs out?” And even though the iPads are with my children in the back seat, I still try to get them to play the license plate game from time to time. We don’t stay in those hideous motels, but when we do stop to rest for the night at a Holiday Inn Express, or somewhere similar, I can’t help but compare.

I love the spirit of road tripping because it creates a different dynamic for us as a family. Instead of doing our separate things, we are in a car together and for at least a good portion of the time we figure out things to do together. But I don’t teach my children the waving game, because who knows what psychos are out there?

Sam