Keep The Kids Entertained

My family travel frequently and for long periods of time we find ourselves sitting in cars driving for miles across the countryside of whichever is our chosen host nation. Travel is a constant source of delight for us. There are always new lands to discover, new people to meet and new adventures and stories to store in our memory banks, which can be taken out at a moments notice, dusted off and embellished to regale other family members and friends back home. We have been blessed to experience the wide open spaces driving across the plains of the North America, the remoteness of the Australian outback, bumped over thousands of miles of dirt roads in Africa, ambled along the coastal highways of New Zealand and California, explored the mountains of Japan and flashed through the states of Europe or held our collective breaths on the narrow roads in rural Ireland.

Already in my children’s relatively young lives we have been blessed to have had many such amazing opportunities. Though wonderful, these long long hours in a car or bus, can at times lead to fatigue and dare I say it, boredom. As a result from time to time I have invented ways to relieve the monotony. Games are a great way to keep everyone occupied, ‘I Spy With My Little Eye’, The Alphabet Game, and an old family favorite, The Number Plate Game have wiled away many’s the hour for our family. The rules for the Number Plate game varies depending on what country we are in or whose turn it is to set the ‘rules of engagement’, it might be who is first to find a number plate from a certain state or country, the first to find a number plate with a given letter or number sequence, with bonus points for listing or making up a story using information about that state or country, the number of ways one can play this game are only limited by ones imagination. And the great thing is it shortens the monotony and we all learn a little something extra along the way.