What should I do in the car for a 20 hour drive?

December 21, 2005 7:16 AM

What should I do in the car for a 20+ hour drive?

My wife, our dog, and I have a 20+ hour drive from Colorado to Mississippi for the holidays. We'll be dividing it up into 2 10 hour days. So what are some things we can do to pass the driving time?

posted by JPigford to Travel & Transportation (23 answers total)

Play white horse.
posted by dydecker at 7:19 AM on December 21, 2005

- Play the license plate game

- Take turns reading to each other, if reading in the car doesn't make you motion sick (obviously: non driver does the reading)

- Teach each other words, numbers, and interesting phrases in a language you know but the other doesn't
posted by contessa at 7:23 AM on December 21, 2005

iPod loaded with light-hearted audiobooks and interviews with people that make you laugh (search the iTunes music store, there are thousands of episodes of fresh air and this american life, etc).
posted by mathowie at 7:23 AM on December 21, 2005

It may seem obvious, but audiobooks are a great way to pass the time. Your local library probably has a ton of them.

I highly recommend the Richard Feynman biographical books (e.g. "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", and "What do you care what other people think?").
posted by Laen at 7:25 AM on December 21, 2005

Pick some favorite books and have the passenger read them to the driver.
posted by ursus_comiter at 7:26 AM on December 21, 2005

Take motion-blurred photos of unfamiliar, out-of-state highway signs
posted by Makebusy7 at 7:27 AM on December 21, 2005

I second the audiobook suggestion.

When we do long trips with the kids, we love audiobooks. We usually get kid friendly ones, but I imagine there must be great adult ones as well. The time passes quickly once I get immersed in a good story. There have been times when the kids have been mad we arrived because they are left with a cliffhanger.
posted by genefinder at 7:29 AM on December 21, 2005

I always like playing "Who am I?"

One person thinks of someone everyone else would know of, and everyone else, or your wife in this case, has to guess who this person is by asking only yes or no questions.

Kind of like 20 Questions or Animal, Vegetable or Mineral.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 7:29 AM on December 21, 2005

Another vote for audiobooks. A friend of mine drove from Tennessee to Colorado last summer and had stocked up on DVDs for his kids, but it turned out his audiobooks were more than sufficient for both the adults and the kids. It might've had something to do with the content (the Lemony Snicket books), but his kids ended up wanting to listen to the books even when they weren't in the car. Also, I really loved my first audiobook experience, listening to Freakonomics.
posted by kimota at 7:45 AM on December 21, 2005

God, I hate Cracker Barrel, but the one thing I can say for them is that they have an audio-book exchange program and they will be located at every other exit along your route.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:10 AM on December 21, 2005

I've got a 12 hour drive ahead of me tomorrow as well, and I'm bringing the following:

Stand-up comedy or other funny CDs - Laughing always makes the time pass more quickly
Audio books
Gameboy Advance - though I limit my time playing it because it's not something you can do together
Crosswords - you can do these together easily
Trivial Pursuit Questions - I just bring the questions and not the whole game.

Good luck on your trip!
posted by Emperor Yamamoto's Eggs at 8:11 AM on December 21, 2005

I'll third or fourth the audiobooks. I commute an hour to and from work everyday, and 10 hours a week on the road gets me a LOT of audiobook listening.

Highly recommended: the Harry Potter audiobooks, with Jim Dale reading. The reader makes ALL the difference for an audiobook, and often the author is a poor choice. These are among the best read books I've listened to.

I always recommend unabridged books, and while there's a lot of good non-fiction, sometimes fiction gets pretty bad when read poorly. My one exception to "authors reading their own books" is autobiographies. I listened to My Life by Clinton, and it was really telling to hear him reading it.
posted by griffey at 8:27 AM on December 21, 2005

Satellite radio, if possible. Plenty of channels - old time radio, comedy, talk, music of every genre, etc.
posted by Futurehouse at 8:37 AM on December 21, 2005

I love listening to audiobooks on the iPod, if you have one. Or buy some on iTunes and burn 'em to CD. When my boyfriend and our dog drove cross-country, we really enjoyed listening to America: The Book. You can also buy lots of good This American Life episodes for relatively cheap.

You could also play Botticelli - sort of like Who Am I? noted above but with an additional layer of trivia. You can play with two people easily and it's really, really fun.
posted by pazazygeek at 9:04 AM on December 21, 2005

This American Life!!

I would suggest listening to local radio every now and then just to change the aural scenery a bit, whatever you choose to listen to. My sister once had a system where they would scan through the channels and once they found a song, they had to stay there for the rest of the song. Then, switch! I guess it worked pretty well for her.
posted by jetskiaccidents at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2005

podcasts, specifically keith and the girl make my weekly 5 hour commute go by in a blink...
posted by dawdle at 9:28 AM on December 21, 2005

i just drove from california to chicago and back, so i should seem somewhat accustomed to "how to manage road trips" but i'm drawing a blank.

tools we used were:
- the ipod
- the baroque cycle
- dvds on the powerbook
- cameras
- fighting.
posted by kooop at 9:32 AM on December 21, 2005

Stop in every state to have sex. It breaks up the monotony pretty well.
posted by camworld at 10:22 AM on December 21, 2005

Another vote for audiobooks - David Sedaris would be choice. Also, Trivial Pursuit and Tribond are fun to play in the car (obviously ditch the board and don't bother to keep score).
posted by zanni at 11:43 AM on December 21, 2005

I also vote audiobooks- I'm a recent convert and I can't even explain how awesome they are for trips. Jodie Foster's reading of Contact was incredible and will get you through 4 and a half hours with ease. Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy wasn't as good, but still enjoyable.

If you make long trips regularly, I might suggest outfitting your car with satellite radio- I dunno about Sirius but XM has stand-up comedy channels which are great, and all content is available across the entire country.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:30 PM on December 21, 2005

I might suggest outfitting your car with satellite radio

Bought an XM Roady in the middle of a long road trip two years ago and haven't looked back. Rarely a shortage of entertaining stuff. Sirius is probably just as good. If you're a Stern junkie, Howard is (or will be soon) on Sirius. XM has This American Life and Air America.
posted by Opposite George at 1:05 PM on December 21, 2005

Sirius is indeed great. And you can get some of the car/home combo recievers for dirt cheap now. FYI, I just tossed the antenna on the shelf under the rear window and it works flawlessly -- there's no need to putz with running the cable up to the roof via the weatherstripping, esp. in this cold weather.

Sirius is usually all I need for a long trip, but I've done the audiobook thing a few times and enjoyed that too.

I like camworld's idea as well.
posted by Tubes at 3:02 PM on December 21, 2005

The Star Wars Radio Drama.
posted by neuron at 10:41 PM on December 21, 2005