Car Games

 Every family, I guess, has their version of car games.  There are the standard ones, many involving punching someone when you see an out of state plate or a VW Bug or a white car.  Not in our family.

We played "Animal Organizations" - this involved taking the 3 letters from a standard California license plate and turning them into short-hand for a union representing animals.  Our van had UAV in that - the United Association of Voles (it's always Voles if you have a "V").  My first car was SCE - the Sisterhood of Crows and Eagles.  My current car - DRF? The Drowsy Roosters Federation.  

There was some standardization - just like "V" was almost always for Voles, you could reliably use A, B, C, F, S, or U to identify your organization - Association, Brotherhood, Committee, Council, Confederation, Federation, Society, Sisterhood, Union, etc.  X was always a challenge.  But isn't it always.

Another game was "Huey Lewis", based on the eponymous band, Huey Lewis and the News.  The standard format was for one person to ask a question, like "Do you know what happened when Huey Lewis got a cold?" and then answer with a rhymre for News - "Huey Lewis and the Ah-choos".  I loved this game.  I could do it for HOURS.  My mom did not enjoy it quite as much.

And we had our version of "Punch Buggy".  There was no punching -we would just count every VW Bug we saw between my grandparents' house in Vallejo and our house in San Francisco.  During my childhood (think mid-to-late '80s and early '90s) we could reliably get to 100 in that hour-long trip.  And if we were running low, there were specific blocks we knew had a colony parked on the street and Daddy would make a detour to take us by there and get us closer to the century mark.

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