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10:48 p.m. - 2005-05-16 Road TripsI was reading an email from a freind whos writing started me down memory lane and road trips way back when, before portable DVD players and Hollywood movies, juice boxes and MP3 players that have become travel essentials for keeping the little ones occupied. I remember trips with my three sisters, cross country. smooshed in the back seat of the car. We didn't dare give our parents trouble or "The Arm" would come waving back and forth trying to give us a wack as we would move from side to side to avoid it, giggling, while the car swerved dangerously in and out of the lane. We would make imaginary dividing lines on the seat and one sister would not be allowed to cross into the other sisters territory. Being the oldest, I used my brains to persuade the little ones how cool it would be if they each scrunched down on the floor, one on each side of the hump...remember when cars had a hump in the back seat. Each one of them would snuggle up with a pillow in the well on their side of the hump and sleep. I would get to stretch out on the whole back seat...now that's using brains. I wonder if they know they were duped? We got along pretty well on those trips unless someone would fart or worse. Little sister, Diane once brought a bottle of perfume and spilled the whole thing all over herself.....that was worse than the fart and it wouldn't just blow out the window....we were stuck with it for the trip. We had this little game called "auto bingo". It was a thick cardboard card with pictures of roadside attractions on it like silo's and barns and wheat bundles and stuff. The pictures were covered with a red, see through plastic window that would slide open and shut across the pictures. The first one to see something out the window represented in the picture, would call it and slide the plastic over the picture. When you got a whole straight line filled in, you yelled Bingo. The game always lasted a while before we got bored. Sometimes we would play the license plate game. Ah...then there were the Girl Scout songs. After a while, Mom and Dad would get silly and start trying to sing like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald....I say they "tried" to sing. Boy we sure had fun as kids. I suspect though that I remember it as being much more fun that it really was. There were some nasty "sister" fights too when we got sick and tired of being cooped up together. I remember when Michelle was little, my Mother found those old Auto Bingo cards. I had her all excited to play until the first day on the road when I discovered that the pictures on the old fashioned Auto Bingo were of things that you can see from a rural state route, like old 66, not from the superhighways, turnpikes and tollways we have now that take you up and over most of the neat things we used to see on a road trip. Maybe that is why we now need DVD's and MP3's, all there is to look at is concrete. P. I. Yarnsmith
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