Games for the Road

The whole idea of vacation is so much fun, hitting the open road for miles and miles in the pursuit of a great campsite, a sight seeing destination, to visit family, or to marvel at a landmark. Whatever your reason may be the entire idea is enticing, that is until the dreaded, “are we there yet’s?” start. If you have kids you know exactly what I’m talking about. It could start as early 20 minutes into your 6 hour trip and continue on until you have turned the radio up to drown out the sound. Well I have found that playing fun car games makes our trips much smoother and more enjoyable for everyone. Not only that but the time seems to fly by and we are there before we know it. Here are some of our favorites.

Before we leave I take a paper plate and cut slits all around until I have 26 tabs all around the plate. I write a letter of the alphabet on each of these tabs. The goal is to find something out the window that starts with each of these letters and then fold back that coinciding letter. Sometimes we will make multiple ones and everyone gets their own plate and the first to find something that starts with all 26 letters wins!

Another fun game that all members of my family seem to enjoy is guessing the song. There are a few ways to do this. You can either have one person hum, whistle, or sing a song while the others try to guess. Whoever guesses it correctly is now the singer. But since my family (myself included) cannot carry a tune if our lives depended on it we have revised this a bit. Our radio displays the singer and the song on the screen so we put a book in front of that and hit seek. The first person to guess the song correctly gets a point and then we hit seek again. This a great way for the vocally challenged.

A tried and true game that we still enjoy playing on the road or even a rainy day in the RV is 20 Questions. There are so many ways to play but our favorite is to pick a category. It could be restaurants, famous people, movies, even people we know. Then the other people in the car get a total of 20 questions to guess who or what the other person is thinking of. The one who guesses correctly is now the person that comes up with the next topic.

And last but not least there is now a free app for your iPhone from go rving called GetAWAY. On this app there are a number of fun car games for people of all ages.

While I think this is certainly a great way to keep the family busy on long road trips I believe it serves another purpose as well. Instead of just wishing the time away, trying to sleep, or burying your head in a book this gives the family uninterrupted time together to play games and have fun. I say instead of dreading the drive think of it as some quality bonding time!