What Games Do You Play On Road Trips?

By the time you've read this, we'll be near the end of America's Memorial Day weekend — the first real long weekend of the year officially kicking off the summer season. AAA forecasted that 45 million of us will be on the roads in that time, and I am one of them, representing one of the few people you know at a race this weekend, along with fellow Jalop writer Brad Brownell and some other cool folks. I've made this pilgrimage every Memorial Day Weekend for the last nine of eleven years, putting a few hundred miles on my car(s). And to be honest, that's too many miles of mostly cornfields along small Michigan and Indiana highways. Like any road trip, sometimes you need a little more than music and podcasts to keep you engaged, and you begin pulling ideas out of your youthful bag of tricks. 

Which brought me to this Sunday's question: What games do you play on road trips? A classic one I've fallen back on is the ABC's game — trying to find letters on license plates, or signs if there aren't enough cars around. The license plate game is another one, although maybe a long game to actually find every state's plate. For the older kids, Padiddle was a common play for teens and college students. But these are staples in the road trip game files, forged long before cellphones became actual pocket computers with more memory and ram than my first college laptop.

My family took many-a-road trip in my youth, and our biggest yearly trip was driving from the Detroit area down to the middle-of-nowhere Alabama.We made this trip 2-3 times a year: up and on the road by 5 a.m., and in the car for five states and at least 11 hours. Without internet my brothers and I had to find ways to keep ourselves occupied. And napping, a handful of CDs, and books (if you weren't carsick) and those travel games only went so far. Otherwise we were left to play the ABC game, slug-a-bug, "I Spy" or whatever else we could come up with.

Today, I'm more apt to play "beat the GPS." When it comes to beating the GPS there's just too much satisfaction in proving the map apps wrong and feeling like I am the superior being to its mapping capabilities.

But I want to know what games you, your friends, or family play on road trips. Are there new ones we should know? Have you created a road trip game that could be the next Cones of Dunshire good? Has the internet taken away all that is wholesome and destroyed real road trip games? We'll find out once I compile your answers for Tuesday.

Safe travels all!