Yellow Car!

After Hubby got back from his NJ trip with the teens, he told me that he learned a new road game.

Seeing as we get bored burying each other's cows, and often have none when traveling through less rural areas, and you can only play the alphabet game so many times before one or both of you gets bored and you forget where you're at in the alphabet, a new road game is exciting stuff.

Although, in a pinch, we will play the cities game as demonstrated by Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Hunnicut in an episode of M*A*S*H, where you start with one person naming a city, and the other has to come up with another city name (any in the world will do, as long as it's verifiable), starting with the last letter of the previous city.  That can be kinda fun, but it gets challenging after awhile, especially when your playing partner tosses out a name like St. Croix.  (Thanks to M*A*S*H and The Shawshank Redemption, I have a grand total of two city names that start with X that I can think of off the top of my head.)  You can't repeat city names...which adds to the challenge.  Not a good game to play when you're, well, not on your A-game.

So.  Yellow Car.

It's similar to our counting-cows game, with several notable exceptions: you're not limited to your side of the road for your counting, you're not having to watch the other side of the road for cemeteries to force your opponent to "bury" his cows while keeping an eye out for cows on your side, and...you're not counting cows.

You're counting yellow cars.

Yellow vehicles of any kind, actually.

There's a couple exceptions: school buses do not count.  Neither do yellow cabs in urban areas (unlike, say, C-burg, where we used to live, which only had two taxis, and they're both white).  Construction vehicles are also out.  Yellow tractors are fine on farms, as long as they're actually farm tractors and not construction tractors.  Yellow boats are okay...as long as they're at the dock or actually in the water.  But if they're on trailers or in drydock, no go.  And all vehicles must be able to operate under their own power in their proper place of movement (in other words, a yellow kayak would count if it were in water).

The first person to see a yellow anything gets it, and nobody else can claim it for their yellow counts.

Fun so far, right?

Here comes the twist:  Unlike burying cows, cemeteries on either side of the road are fair game for whoever sees them first.  Shouting out, "Bury your cars!" forces your opponents' car counts down to zero.  Churches also come into play; see one, and shout "Marry my cars!" to immediately double your car count.  If you have a church and cemetery side by side, you'd better be fast if you want to double your count and keep it...so I'd suggest burying your opponents' cars before marrying your own.

Yes, I know that sounds weird.

So.

The other night, we scooted down to C-burg to go to Five Below so the twins could pick out new backpacks for school (*sniff*), and on the way home, Hubby started playing Yellow Cars without telling me we were playing.  (Minor detail.)  Plus, I hadn't really committed the game to memory as he was describing it, largely because I was tired after three days of single mom and sick kid.

Never let it be said that I'm not a good sport, so I played along.

I scanned the highway for several minutes before I pointed and shouted out, "Yellow car!"

"What was it?" Hubby asked.

"A Hummer."

"Are you sure?  'Cause there's a Jeep or something that looks a lot like a Hummer, but isn't."

"No, it was either an H2 or H3.  It was a Hummer."

"Yeah, I think you're right.  It was a Hummer."  Hubby slumped down in his seat.  "You just won the game."

"What?"

"If you see a yellow Hummer, you win."

"Well, that's a key piece of information that you didn't give me!"

Hubby shrugged.

Heh.

First time playing the game, and I win without realizing it.