Old Fashioned Games to Help Make The Miles Roll By on Family Driving Vacations

Its no secret that driving vacations can take their toll on both parents and children, however when we went on long driving trips with our kids we oftentimes played some interactive games that seemed to help the miles roll by. Not only can some of these games be fun, but time will seem to go by faster because focusing on other things helps to take your focus off of the time and distance you are traveling.

One easy game is the alphabet game. In this game you simply start with the letter 'A' and once someone sees something that starts with that letter, then you move on to the next letter. You might have to allow a little latitude for some of the harder letters like say 'Q', in order to keep the game from faltering for too long, such as “a quick car just passed us”. You can also have the license plate game in effect for the entire trip, which is just announcing when you see a license plate from a state that you hadn't seen yet on the trip.

Another game we played on family trips was Twenty Questions, which we ended up calling the guessing game, as we typically would not bother to count the number of questions each time. The way this games works is that someone things of something that is a person, animal, place, or thing and then the other people make guesses and through the process of elimination you determine the answer. The person that gets the answer then gets to think of the next word.

Another family trip game was Password. This is played with two teams of two people and it is just like the TV show. You take turns having each person think of a word and then the opposing team can either pass or play for 10 points. You can only give one word clues and answers and after each incorrect guess, it becomes worth one less point. If the word has not been guessed and the point value is 5, then the word is thrown out and the person that thought of it has to come up with another word. The game is played until one team reaches 31 points. It usually works best to have one person in the front seat of the car team up with one person in the back seat so that when you are whispering the word to the opposite team you are not leaning over the seat. The key to this game is to come up with words that are not too easy or too difficult.