FAMILY FUN IN THE CAR TIPS BY STRETCHING THE ONE INCOME DOLLAR

As a parent, when you Buy a Car, several issues probably come to mind. How will you pay it off? How will you keep it clean? How long will it last? However, one question you might not consider is how you will keep your children entertained on long road trips. It is no secret that it can be difficult to keep the average kid's attention. More "modernized" parents who are wealthy enough to do so may choose to turn on the built-in DVD player or toss their kids MP3 players or hand-held gaming devices. However, if you are the budgeting family, or just prefer "old-fashioned", wholesome

entertainment, there a number of traditional in the car games to prevent child boredom.

One classic game you can play on long road trips is Twenty Questions. If for some reason you are not familiar with the game, the rules are simple. One person picks a well-known place, object, or person, while the others gather clues to make a guess by asking yes or no questions. You can get creative with this game by choosing topics that are "inside jokes" in your family.

Another favorite is counting cows or any common sight really. The rules are, again, simple. Choose a point in your route at which everyone will stop counting. Then, count all of the defined objects on your side of the car. Whoever has counted the most at the end is the winner. You could count a specific type of car, color, mailboxes, a certain type of tree, or anything you are likely to see on your way through.

There is one variation of the 'counting cows' game that is particularly popular and can be applied to any road trip and that is counting license plates. In this variation, you can either count how many different states you see, or you can each pick a state and count how many license

plates from that state you see. A more creative game using the license plates of passing cars is using the letters on the plates to come up with a phrase. For instance, a plate that says "HHS 4325" could be hip-hop songs. Alternatively, a plate that says "GDTY 23" could be "good day to you". The first person to come up with a phrase gets credit for it.

Perhaps the oldest road trip game is naming a place in the world, be it a city, state, country or province and then someone has to say another place that starts with the same letter as the last letter of the last

place. So, if you start with "Tokyo", the first person to say "Oklahoma" or some other place starting with "O" gets that point. Of course, it is fun even if you do not keep track of points. A similar game that is more challenging is starting with a letter, like "F" and then being the first person to see and identify three things that start with "F", such as football, fire and finch. Whoever is first picks the next letter.

Thank you to Stretching the One Income Dollar for this guest post!