Motorcycle Motorcycle

When I was growing up my family took a lot of road trips. My Dad was a teacher and my Mom was a homemaker, so our summers were wide open. We camped across the States and back a few times, so I've been to more national monuments & parks than probably anyone else my age. (Grand Canyon twice!) This is back in the days of manual windows and the walkman, where you prayed that your batteries would last a few more days in the car, and that it wouldn't eat your Miami Vice soundtrack cassette. Don't get me wrong, I loved my family, and we saw a lot of amazing things.... but when you are 12 and on a road trip for two months with your parents and siblings, you can kind of lose your mind a little.

At any rate, one of the things that we did to pass the time was to play Horsey Horsey. Now, for you city kids who are unfamiliar with this diverse and complex game, let me explain. You see a horse, you yell 'horsey horsey!' and whoever has the most horses at the end of the trip wins. That's it. The most excitement comes if someone sees a cemetery and yells out 'bury your horses!' and you have to start from zero. I know what you're thinking, that this game is a sad little way to amuse small children and that a 12 year old would not think this was cool. Sadly, I was that lame, and I guess my 16 year old brother was equally lame, because we all played it with vigor. And when you are traveling the great plains of America, you are bound to see a lot of horses, so the count could get up into the hundreds, with the carnage of the cemetery ever looming in your mind.

Fast forward to road trips with my own children. We don't see so many horses around these parts, given that we live in the burbs and our only road trips are 75 minutes to the campground every weekend. It may be in Lancaster County, but it's still a pretty dry game when you're traveling the turnpike. So instead, we play Motorcycle Motorcycle. This works well, but they seem to need to play a form of this game at all times now, and the competition ramps up more and more each time. On a hike this morning they changed it to Bikey Bikey and then Persony Persony. At that point we reined them in a bit and asked that we please stick to one ridiculous game at a time. On the drive home earlier tonight, the Princess gleefully suggested that we play Signy Signy. I thought that maybe we could instead just have a quiet ride home. The Man thought that maybe we could play Roadkill Roadkill instead. Not too many miles down the road however, they settled for poking each other with their feet and giggling while the Man and I turned Travis Tritt up loud enough to drown them out. The Barnacle, who clearly found all of this behavior beneath him, sat quietly in his seat with his bee (pacifier) and blankey, with only an occasional noise to request his cup.

And not to brag, but I won the day with 27 motorcycles, because no matter what the Man says you are not allowed to count the ones inside the motorcycle store.