Swell Saturday: Road Trip Edition

School is almost out and the season of road trips is nearly upon us. Whether you're visiting your parents, planning a trip to Disneyland with your kids, driving cross country with your best friend, or just going to Target, here are some of the Bruce family's favorite car games to help make your trip a bit sweller.

Rhyme Out: The only thing more satisfying than gloating is gloating through song. Therein lies the genius of "Rhyme Out", one of the Bruce siblings' all time favorite car games. While watching "Sesame Street" one morning, I was enthralled by a segment where Big Bird and Maria traded rhymes until one of them ran out of words. The winner then sang, "I rhymed you out, that's what the game's about! You ran out of time to think of a rhyme, it's rhyme out, rhyme out." A game that involved singing and vocabulary: what a winning combination! My brother and I started playing this constantly and I think it helped my verbal score on the SATs more than Latin, vocabulary cards, and Princeton Review practice tests put together.

GHOST: The rules are simple enough. The players spell out a word with each person adding one letter at a time. If you end the word, you receive a "G." If you do it again, you get an "H", then an "O" and so on. If you end the word five times, you become a "Ghost" and can no longer win the game. To add insult to injury, no one can talk to a Ghost or they'll receive a letter. I used to think this game was fun until I was soundly beaten by every other person in the car on a trip back from Santa Cruz last summer. Now I believe that "GHOST" is cruel and potentially damaging to your psyche. Not only did I have to live with the fact that everyone else's spelling and vocabulary skills were ten times better than mine, I spent the rest of the game trying to engage people in conversation only to be passionately ignored. As you can probably imagine, these wounds cut deep. But I'm slowly healing by plotting my revenge and memorizing the dictionary.

Create a Chord: My family loves The Eagles and we're determined to one day perform "Seven Bridges Road" in perfect harmony (just like the Von Trapps!) I think our Create a Chord game will help us achieve our goal. One person sings a note, a second person adds another note and so on until we create a chord. We then pat ourselves on the back and talk about how lovely that chord was before we try to sing an even better one. My brother and I have a sick version of this game where we try to sing the most revolting chord we can think of. Unfortunately for everyone else in the car, this may be my most loved road trip pastime of all. The great thing about Create a Chord is that you can play it by yourself too! I harmonize to the radio all the time (I mean, The Fray's "Cable Car" is just begging for someone to sing a fourth above the last note of the song.)

Got You Last: As a child I was dazzled by stories of my mother's youth and one of her most intriguing tales involved a game that she and her four sisters played called "You're It, I Quit." This was a rather sadistic exercise which consisted of tagging someone and then saying you quit before they could tag you back. Inspired, I began my own version of this game by tagging my brother, yelling "got you last" and running away before he could tag me. This evolved into a more sophisticated road trip version in which we attempted to tag each other twice but make it feel like just one tag. That way the other person would only tag back once, never knowing that they had just lost the game by not tagging back twice. Because of this game, there were four or five years where Jeff and I could not shake hands, hug, or even accidentally brush up against each other in the hall without tagging the other person back.