Road Tripping

DESIGN | by DEBRA PRINZING

LONG BEFORE iPods and built-in DVD players, American kids had to find ways to pass the time in the family car.

SOURCE: iSTOCKPHOTO.COM

During the 1960s and early 1970s, my younger brothers and I were three of those kids. Books, crosswords, card games and art projects were part of Mom’s bag of time-passing tricks. But it was our Dad who made the miles fly by between Massachusetts and Illinois; Indiana and California. Here are the activities I remember fondly:

• Singing rounds of nonsense songs that Dad probably learned working at summer camps in the ’40s and ’50s. “B-I-N-G-O,” “Go tell Aunt Rhody,” “I’m my own Grandpa,” are a few that we remember. Silly, yes, but we worked hard to memorize all the verses and we each had our favorite car-trip song.
• Dad created a ridiculous game called “Turkey”, with points earned based on the first letter of any farm animal we spotted. “Horse” earned 8 points since “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet (chickens and cows, 3 points; pigs, 16 points, etc). To win automatically, one needed to see a turkey, 50 points. You can only imagine how seldom this happened, if ever. But we still kept hoping a turkey farm was just around the next bend.
• Dad crafted another wild mealtime game at supermarkets along the way. He gave everyone 50 cents to $1 for our under-$10 family lunch. The game was to shop for food and trade, share or combine our ingredients to create a meal. This sounds pretty sad, but actually it was a blast.

While it may not have been super-healthy, we sure had a fun summer vacation tradition, and we never realized how much our folks had to pinch pennies to pull off the trip in the first place. Even though our journeys were completely low-tech and low-budget, they inspired a lifetime of stories that my brothers and I still tell today. Sometimes I wish my own two sons could experience those summers. I bet I’d never again hear one of them say, “I’m bored” or “When are we getting there?”