What do you do to pass the time on long car rides?
I can’t read or play games or even crochet in the car because I get violently ill. So when I was little and we took a lot of road trips we’d play license plate bingo or sing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. My dad loved that last one.
Nowadays I engage in healthy activities known as Yelling Along With Kelly Clarkson/Fun./Lady Gaga Songs and playing “what if we won the lottery” with Mr. A.
A.
These days a book or crossword puzzle works. As a kid (youngest of three), spotting Volkswagen Beetles or cars with only one working headlight did the trick. Am pretty sure we sang any/all songs that annoy the crap out of parents in the front seat. Magnetic checkers were another diversion.
Crossing the Atchafalaya Causeway, especially before the second span was built, seemed to last…forever.
It’s a 15 hr round-trip drive from Chez Feral to the FeralFarm, a excursion made at least once a month. Audiobooks have come to be essential for the trip. My 2004 Tacoma pickup came with a cassette player and I’ve picked up boxes of books on tape dirt cheap. That and the local library for books on CD helps make the drive seem shorter.
I choose combos of books that can be completed during a single trip so sometimes tunes are required for filler, easily done from my 1k+ CD collection.
I get car sick when I read in a car or bus too. I like to crack really fast music up for driving purposes. The Stones are always good driving music.
Ah, yes. Playing “What if we win the lottery?” never gets old.
Also, never happens…
adrastos – absolutely! There are certain songs that just make you want to put the pedal to the metal. I have a few driving mixes I’ve made when I’ve been looking forward to a road trip.
Yes, we play “music to speed by” on the Ipod…
Music, music, music. I’m another who can’t read or look at anything close up without getting sick.
music or NPR. daytime its scenery, nighttime? music.
Sometimes I’m so busy, those long car rides are the only opportunity I have to just relax. Often the ride is taken through scenic countryside so I enjoy looking at whatever we are passing. I like noticing new places, I like looking at trees and flowers and everything else that we pass.
I am an artist so I find that it provides me with a fresh perspective and fresh scenes to use in my work. I usually come back from trips that are long with lots of ideas.
I CAN read while Ms. RAM’s driving and so my iPhone is my favorite trip companion. I have, at last count, 524 books loaded on it. Also, when we bought our Chevy Equinox a few years ago, Sirius XM radio came with it. We never thought we’d spend the money to keep it, but after road trips west to Arizona and east to the Maritime Provinces, we’ve decided we never want to be without it again. And there’s always the license plate game.
Fortunately I can either knit or read in moving vehicles, so usually I’ll pick one of those, but if it’s an extremely long ride (e.g. road trip from Chicago to NYC and back for a weekend – that was brutal) it was just pretty much nonstop conversation peppered with a few actual sing-alongs to Broadway musicals and My Little Pony songs.
My SO is a lovely sweet genius who knows how to get podcasts onto an Android, which he plugs into the dash in my ’97 truck when we’re on the road. So I have Star Trek Outpost, or Planetary Radio, or Mission Logs, to listen to. Or, if we’ve run completely through all the backlog of weeklies, Android Central and Texas Parks and Wildlife.
“Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” podcasts and the most excellent Mark Maron podcast “WTF,” which features long-form interviews by Mark with comedians, musicians, actors and other folks. Mark has turned into a quite good (and knowledgeable) interviewer and the long-form (an hour or so) lets his guests relax and open up. Listened to interview with Elizabeth Banks, Michael Keaton and John Hodgeman on a drive to and from DC this weekend. Wonderful stuff and highly recommended.