Are you expecting this post to be about the psychological weirdnesses that some couples indulge in? No! This is about real games Sid and Doris play on Epic Journeys.
Because obviously our lives are cram-packed with incident; we are constantly stopping to delight in small details… and yet, and yet, sometimes we do need to simply get a big bag of kilometres under your belt even though we are starting to get Deja Village. So let’s put the legs into auto-pedal mode and have a bit of a chat as we go along, with small breaks as trucks waaa-zoooooommmm past.
One game we play in the car is I-Spy, and our favourite variant on that is to just pick a letter for the day and then you have to take it in turns to find things starting with that letter. As I am sure you’ve found when playing this yourself, for the first while there is nothing in the entire universe starting with the letter S (or whatever) but actually if you Stick at it you will be Surprised what you See.
We’ve mentioned one-off events like National Carrying Square Things Day, but we also have some standing awards, most notably for RoofRack Of The Day (any strange load counts). This is not a very productive game in the First World but can become more entertaining in countries where Man With Van has yet to make his presence felt. Today Sid spotted two credible candidates, a Peugeot 309 filled completely with logs and dragging its exhaust along the floor, and a very small flatbed truck with a surprising large tractor on the back (“Spotto!”) which even struggled to overtake us.
So I need to explain Spotto, and full credit must be given to Tim and Sarah (aka The Maddock Martins) who taught us this on our first trip to Morocco a gazillion years ago. Spotto, in its simplest form, simply consists of seeing a tractor, and saying “Spotto” – first to 10 points wins. In southern Morocco we ran out of tractors and so the variant “Wrecko” was created – a rusty wreck down the bottom of a ravine (especially if the road is not protected by armco) scored one point, a group of people actually standing around the wreck and arguing about it scored more. For Sid and Doris variations have developed over the years, such as “Boat-o” (a boat in a place that you do not expect to see a boat, and the more weird the better – top marks for that building in Singapore that is shaped like a boat) and “Open-o” (an illuminated sign that proclaims a shop to be Open). This game is permanently running and variations can be created on the fly to suit local traditions.
The next one came from the Specs and was originally called “I can see the sea! 50p to me!” 50, or .50, or less of the local currency units are awarded for seeing a long-expected sight. At the moment this is awarded to sightings of the Danube after it has gone round in a long lazy loop and we have toiled over the hill in between.
There is also Beard/Tummy Cricket which awards points for… well, you can work that one out. And like Mornington Crescent, the rules for this one remain shrouded in mystery to you but crystal clear to me the author.
And finally, I must confess that even Doris does occasionally play psychological games on Sid. A few days ago he was getting very concerned about his right knee and so I innocently enquired “I expect you have now seen every sort of Yugo there is?”. It kept him occupied all the way through Serbia, and as we left the hotel this morning he triumphantly pointed and said “There is a Zastava pickup with a Truckman-style rear section! Now I have seen all the Yugos!”
I will need to find a Bulgarian equivalent.
There is no need for you to tell Sid about that last bit, thank you.