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.