If I’m honest, my usual plan of action, when I know we have a long car or train journey ahead of us, is to charge up all things electronic, dig out the headphones, get the kids to choose a book each and add a pillow or two to the back seat – that usually keeps the kids quiet for a good few hours, which makes for a happier journey all round.
But last week we had a slight trauma when we realised just before a three hour journey that I’d forgotten to charge everything up and I hadn’t even remembered to prepare our usual car journey things. The children were mildly traumatised at the thought of an old fashioned car journey where they would be without headphones and therefore forced to listen to either the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack or Gloria Estefan’s Greatest Hits. (My car was broken into and most CDs taken but they left those two for some reason).
Looking back on my own childhood memories, car journeys used to be fun without having to resort to tablets, phones and headphones, didn’t they? So we decided to have an old school, retro car journey with no electronics and nothing other than us (except for the pillow obviously) and we had so much fun.
The more games we played, the more I remembered from when I was younger, so we ended up playing loads of different games, keeping each one short to avoid the chances of boredom / arguments / whinging etc. Here are the ones I can remember:
- The Cloud Game – eyes up to the sky and use your imagination to spot shapes in the clouds. We love this game and the kids often play it at home whilst lying on the grass in the back garden.
- Eye Spy.
- Counting Cars – each choose a different coloured car and see who can get the most in a set time (hint: don’t choose yellow or pink ;-)).
- Rock, Paper, Scissors.
- I went to the Supermarket and bought….
- Group Story Time – Take it in turns to tell part of a story making it as random as possible.
- Twenty questions.
- Who am I?
- Fizz Buzz
I used to love car journeys with my family when I was younger – it meant having uninterrupted time with my parents and the journey was always as much fun as the rest of the trip and although I’m still a fan of electronics for car journeys, we’ll definitely be turning them off before the batteries die in future and going retro again.
Image supplied by Canvas Holidays
Post in collaboration with Canvas Holidays
