Road trips not for faint of heart

In Saskatchewan, we are approaching the holiday season, also known as the road trip season, as we all make our way to visit those relatives that we have chosen to live four hours away from.

If you have children, you need to have a road trip plan. Kids are killers. And in an enclosed space, they will destroy your desire to live in a very short time. And short of buying each child an individual cage for transport (probably illegal), parents buy stuff to distract their young ’uns from tearing the vehicle apart from the inside-out.

Ideally, you must have a backseat entertainment centre and wireless internet access. While parents are ostensibly having a civilized conversation in the front seats ( but really just arguing about who is lazier), kids can relax by playing violent video games. And if the kids can’t agree on a game, then parents can pull out the iPad, which I believe comes included with every live birth.

But today’s kids are missing out — a road trip is not about distracting yourself from the tedium of travelling; it’s about learning to enjoy the tedium of travel.

My family has always travelled. Whether it’s visiting family in southern Saskatchewan or northern Manitoba or making the traditional prairie pilgrimage to the Edmonton waterslide park, we have been on the road.

We didn’t have money for fancy extras like DVD players; we barely had money for luxuries like gas. How then did we entertain ourselves?

This is where a child’s ingenuity kicks in. We started our trip playing, Let’s Make Someone Cry. To play, you need at least two players and one victim. The players must bombard the victim with teasing until the victim breaks down in a flood of tears. The more tears, the better the game. The great thing about this game is you never know when you’re gonna be a player, or a victim.

After a successful round of LMSC, my mom would shout us into submission. Now it was storytelling time. During this time, mom would explain the world to us, mixing her knowledge with what she referred to as “colour” but which I have learned was really utter nonsense. There was only one rule during storytelling time: Don’t interrupt mom with pesky facts.

I enjoyed these times. How else would I have learned that the flu vaccine causes flu epidemics because scientists get paid per person who gets sick and that the only scientists that you can trust are cigarette scientists because at least they ain’t lying to you?

When mom ran out of theories, it was then music appreciation time. Now for those of you who love music and have thousands of songs playing on your phone (it felt so weird typing that — our phones are seriously amazing), this may be tough for you to grasp. Once upon a time, people played these things called cassettes and people like my mom, usually owned about one at a time. On one trip, my mom played the same tape for six hours. It was Don Williams.

I listened to that cassette for so long that I actually felt those songs imprinted into my brain. Especially that song Amanda because their relationship seemed so needlessly complicated. He’s singing about how Amanda should be a “gentleman’s wife” and not with some guy over 30 wearing jeans. To my 10-years-old self, the solution was clear: Buy some slacks or khakis, maybe even a pair of cargo shorts? To my adult self: If you’re over 30 and you can still fit in jeans, you’re doing something right.

After music time, came the eventful Spot the Moose hours. Back then, moose seemed to be around every corner. In fact, on one night, they literally were around every corner.

Our lights flashed on them standing on the side of the road; these modern day dinosaurs staring down at the tiny car filled with kids and blaring Don Williams. I’m sure they were thinking the same thing we were, “Who the hell is Amanda and what’s her problem with jeans?”