License Plates, Horses, and YooHoo!!

For my first post, I thought I'd harken back to a simpler time. A time before cars had DVD players and video game consoles. A time before cell phones, facebook, myspace and twitter, when a kid had to use his/her imagination to entertain themselves on those long car rides to visit relatives. See if this takes you back....

If you were a Bitter kid in the Seventies, chances are, you spent many a summer in a little town called Washington Indiana. The oldest of the siblings were fortunate (or maybe not so fortunate), to spend their entire summers there, with Bea and Sis (our great aunts). Those of us who came around on the back end, only got to spend a few weeks there. But, oh the memories, even still. Fried chicken at the Knights of Columbus, watching a little league game at Allen Field, fetching some milk (and sometimes cigarettes) from Jimmy's or Arnold's groceries....the list goes on and on.

Being one of the two youngest siblings, I don't have the benefit of some of the memories my older brothers and sister have, but one sticks out in particular.

You see, this drive to Washington was about 3 1/2 hours, give or take. In order to keep our minds off the time, Ben (the youngest of the brood) and I would play the License plate game, slug bug, etc.... Dad was not what you would call a pillar of patience, and he would almost instantly grow tired of the blood curdling shouts of "SLUG BUG" from the back seat. So, in an ingenious attempt to keep us quiet, he devised a new game, which he called "the cemetary game" The object was simple. We would have to count as many horses as we could (quietly to ourselves, of course) as we passed the many small farms along the roadside. For each horse we counted, he would give us a nickel when we arrived at our destination. The caveat, though, was that we would lose all of our nickels each time we passed a cemetary. By the time we hit our first gas station stop, we'd usually have earned enough nickels to get a soda pop for the rest of the ride. However, for some strange reason, Ben and I always went with Yoohoo as our drink of choice. Back on the road. With frosty Yoohoos in hand, we began, once again to count horses along the way, losing nickels as fast as we won them. After building up what seemed like a fortune in small silver coins, we were less than five minutes from our destination, when.............Oh No, another cemetary!!!! Man, were we bummed! All those shiny nickels right down the drain!!! This happens every ti.......Hey, wait a minute!!!!!

I don't recall how many trips we took to Indiana while playing this silly game, but I do know there were several before we caught on and realized that we would pass the same cemetary right at the end of our trip every year!!!! Fathers have an uncanny way of getting what they want. This was a brilliantly devised scheme to keep the kids quiet for the long trip, and it didn't cost him a nickel!!!!

I tried this one on my own kids several years ago, but they caught on much faster than we did. I guess I'll take comfort in the fact that they were obviously smarter than I was at that age. Oh well, thank God for DVD players and video games!!!!