Family Reunion Day

After 2,812 miles on my motorcycle I made it into my parents' place with a day and a half to rest up before we embarked on the roads to Alaska. Of course, I didn't really rest. In fact, I did something to my arm playing my parents on their Wii. As was to be the norm throughout the trip but so far I was unsuspecting, I lost. What's more, I damaged my shoulder. I think it was the Wii baseball. They were just flicking their wrists but to get the speed of my fast ball up, I had to do the full wind up.

After not resting, I got up and was fully dressed for our 7:00 AM departure when my father serenaded my with his traditional "wake up" song. (Calling it a song is being generous, or at least the way he sings it.) Despite my protests that I was not only up but dressed, he carried through to the very end. Later he confessed that certain of my other relatives insisted that he "sing" the traditional morning song. I must admit that he had children who got up promptly without extraordinary measures. On the rare occasion that one of us triggered the "song," the ones who didn't made sure the guilty party didn't have another relapse for a while. Of course, I encouraged his waking my children up that way.

The first stop on our Alaska excursion was the Westbrook Family Reunion. This reunion has been occurring for years. Some of my earliest memories are of it, which means its once a year occurrence definitely made an impression. (Thanksgiving was another major "reunion" memory but that was only my father's parents' descendants.) At least half of the attendees, if not more, were the Thanksgiving crew and their descendants.

When I was a child attending this thing, it was a lot more play but I felt right at home eating and talking, a lot of both. Of course, I missed a lot of them as my family moved West. I was guaranteed the prize for the person who traveled the furthest to get there.

The highlight was the fundraiser auction of all the items each family brought. Since I rode a motorcycle, I didn't buy anything for me but tried to buy something for each of my sisters. It was easy for my two youngest, probably because I bought things they didn't really want. But my oldest sister decided she really wanted something and WOULDN'T LET ME BUY IT. Since it was only money and for a good cause, I kept bidding. Finally I attracted her attention and told her to stop bidding already. I don't think she really believed that I was bidding on it to gift it to her until it was delivered to her.

After talking late into the afternoon, so late it was evening, we finally left for our first night's stop, my middle sister. We got there late enough that we didn't do much but eat again and go to bed. The road to Alaska was beckoning and we wanted to get to it.

Alaska Trip: Road Games

Many of my early memories of car trips involved road games. While many of them had a learning reinforcement aspect, most of them were designed to keep the kids relatively quiet. (This may be why many of our trips before we children grew old enough to participate in the games were at night when we would sleep.) When we were old enough, the games kept us busy enough to keep us from asking, at least frequently, "Are we there yet?"

But my parents must have liked playing the games because they continued the practice even after we children were long out of the house, and car. This is why this Alaska trip reminded of all of our games plus. They've continued to add to them.

I'm not going to go into all of the rules for ABC, Red Truck, Wash/White Horse, ... Nor am I going to discuss the ones they added after we grew up: License Plate Cribbage, Gators and Road Kill, ... However, they introduced yet another game on this trip: Distance Guessing.

Distance guessing involves picking a suitably far enough out road feature, such as the road cresting a hill in the distance and guessing the number of miles it was away, sometimes in tenths. The person with the most accurate guess won. They must have played this game a lot between themselves because both of them were far more accurate than I. I discovered that I really don't know how long a mile is. You would think that driving a Prius with it's navigation system would have acclimatized me to that but I think it had the opposite effect. With a navigation system, I didn't have to think how far I had to go or had gone because I could just refer to the navigation system.

Distance guessing wasn't the only game we played on the road. We played a lot of card games in the morning before we got on the road and in the evening when we stopped. Well, we only played three kinds of card games: Cribbage, Gin, Cutthroat Euchre and Setback. At least Cribbage, Gin, and Euchre had their own game by game scoring system so the actual wins and losses weren't recorded. While I don't think I had a winning record, there is nothing to prove that I didn't.

Unfortunately this is not so with Setback. In fact, since I had my 2009 Daytimer ready to hand, I became the score keeper of record. After I got home I compiled this record and discovered that in the 52 games I recorded for the three of us I came in third. I came in first the fewest times and second the most but the weighted scoring put me in third. (I was actually fairly close to second, my father, but my mother was first by a wide margin.)

I'm glad my parents taught me that "it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game." I had a lot of fun even in losing.