Journey vs. Destination

I have been concerned about the time spent in the car. I mean, I don’t like to be in a car. And I don’t like to be idle. Except with a good book. But I get carsick if I try to read.

That sounds like a recipe for disaster. [Whenever anyone says that I think something along the lines of: two cups people (mixed gender preferred), one cup idleness, 136 galleons of gasoline, place into car travelling at 70 mph, shake until done (at least 40 hours per recipe).]

I’ve been thinking about what to do while in the car. I suspect we’ll run out of podcasts by day two, even the ones that are on my list because they sound interesting but I’ve never actually listened to them.

I successfully picked up more Spanish in my hated 10-month-long commute to Palo Alto than I did in two years of high school Spanish. The Coffee Break Spanish from Radio Lingua was fantastic in large part because the podcasters were Scottish and a little harder to understand in English than they were in Spanish.

And C knows French, a language I tried to study some but if we studied together, we could pretend to be French tourists (zee pastree, eet ees eensiped! Zotolo! Bring me a cwassant!). Or we could start at zero for both of us and go with German (again, so we can pretend to be tourists, though Swedish would be better if we could keep ourselves from saying borkborkbork) or Japanese (actually a language I’m interested in learning). I’d love to learn how to say “hello”, “please”, “thank you”, “goodbye” and “where is the bakery?” in every language I could. But C isn’t into it and he thinks trying to learn while driving may be difficult. I’ll go quietly delete the Portugese language podcast. And the Russian one.

But, hmmm, 40 hours in the car. I’ll need something to do. So I was thinking about that.

• Audio books in the car have been tough… the story flows without pauses and breaks so if one of us wants to point out “hey, check out that sign” we lose some narrative. So the book has to be simple enough to ignore minor interruptions. And an excellent narrator, good story. I think the two best books we’ve had before were Micheal J Fox’s Funny Man and John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars (read by Wil Wheaton). We did get a pile of books and lectures so we’ll have our choice.



• I can look up hotels and whatnot, getting a little carsick and hoping for decent signal. (Though we have some paper guides so that will help.)
• I can blog (badly) since I can type in the car (but I can’t read back). Though my wifi keyboard is kind of loud so C may not enjoy this.
• Every day, we are going to purchase a new album and listen to at least half of it. The album should be something related to where we are, such as the band sang about it (Route 66, 18 Miles to Memphis), the band originated in the state we are passing through (oh Wikipedia, I love you), or the album benefits something on the day’s route. I’m hoping the “which album to buy” discussion is amusing as well as increasing my musical horizons. And I suspect good albums could be listened to 2-3 times that day and revisited.
• Watching movies in the car is possible given the ipad. As long as it is something the driver is happy listening to (Star Wars, Princess Bride, etc). This would still make me carsick but I can listen as well, don’t have to watch the classics.

A friend suggested cross-stitch or knitting but I don’t know how to do either and I bet learning will be carsick inducing unless I start now. Also the potential for poking my eye out seems high.

License plate spotting doesn’t seem that exciting to me. C’s vision is about double mine so that makes it particularly tedious. Twenty questions with someone you’ve lived with for more than a decade is not that hard. There are other car games but none seem to appeal quite yet.

C says he’s going let me drive every day. While that should help some with the boredom, it doesn’t rate as amusing.

Any ideas?