Travel Bingo

This post has been in the works for years, and I'm finally getting around to writing it. It makes sense, really. Last weekend I made one of my final trips between Champaign and Chicagoland - twice. I came up to Chicago to see Sister Hazel, my favorite live band on Saturday night and then moved in Monday. With that much driving through almost nothing but farmland and an occasional town or wind turbine, you need something to keep yourself occupied. The radio doesn't always cut it. I've listened to Italian language programs, audiobooks and news radio. You need something to look for. A game of sorts. It helps on long drives.

As a kid, we had little red plastic boards that had pull tabs, almost like a bingo board with different objects under the tabs. As you saw them on your roadtrip, you pulled the tab across.  They looked something like these:

We had a roadtrip every year growing up. We travelled with three other families (the fathers had all been college roomates) who by the time I was a teen lived across the USA. Each year one family picked the destination. We did everything from Colorado, Virginia, Tennessee & New York. We did family trips, too, to see my grandparents and family in Florida and Virginia. In addition to the bingo games we did license plate searches, seeing who could get the most on a trip or even which color car we saw the most.

Weirdly, the license plate thing stuck with me even into adulthood. I tended to keep my eyes peeled for plates on my walk to work when I lived in the city. On an average day I saw six state plates. If I didn't see six on my way in I superstitiously believed it would be a rough day. I don't know if that was ever true, although I had my share of difficult days! There weren't many days I saw less than six. (You can see my previous post about this obsession here).

Moving on to my last four years living in Central Illinois, I needed a new thing to occupy my two and a half hour drive north (for the record, my best time was exactly two hours door to door). What I discovered was that early on in those first few drives the same trucks tended to pop up in my view. The one I recognized most often was the Sherwin Williams paint truck. It has a vibrant red and blue coloring on the back and sides and is hard to miss. Only once, in my many drives north and south did I not see one of these trucks. And last weekend I even saw one being hauled by a yellow cab, adding to the color mix. Here is a picture of one I took earlier this year:

In fact, on that Saturday drive before I moved, I saw a record 11 Sherwin Williams trucks going north and seven coming back. I'd never seen that many. Apparently they are really on the move during the weekends!








So there you go. I'll probably come up with something new as I drive north to school and back each day. It will probably be license plates for a while. (I have just three left to find this year - Alaska, Delaware and Rhode Island - two of which I hope to see when I head to New York sometime later this year. And yes, I did see Hawaii. It was just north of Rantoul on I-57 about two months ago!)

What do you do to occupy yourself on your travels? I'd love to know. Leave a comment and share your travel tales!
KB