AUTO BINGO!

Growing up in Kansas City, my nearest relatives were an 8-hour drive north on I-35...through Iowa, which was deadly to a restless kid trapped in the back seat of a car with her older brother. When I was a kid, I had auto bingo cards (kinda like these), and we would play on the long trip to either set of grandparents in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Because there were so few signs along certain stretches of highway in Iowa, we always abandoned playing the alphabet game, so auto bingo was a better bet. The cards I had used little transparent red windows that you would slide shut to claim the square. I no longer have them, but I loved them. I was an auto bingo fiend.

Yesterday a friend and I were on a 12-hour drive back home to Kansas City from Wisconsin--the same longest regular drive my family used to do when I was a kid. I didn't want to read, as that seemed a little rude to my friend, who was doing all of the driving.

So in an attempt to be interactive yet occupied, a third of the way into Iowa I thought of the idea of drawing my own auto bingo board to entertain myself and do an sf0 task to boot.

At first I was only going to count squares if I could photograph them for this proof. Since my friend was driving, he couldn't really play, and it was just the two of us, so I thought the photos would make it more challenging. But at 75 mph, my camera isn't quick enough. I'd sit with it ready and then it would take a while to see something, so the camera had powered down and I missed whatever it was by the time I got it going again. Or I just couldn't snap fast enough as we passed a barn or whatever. Toward the end of the Iowa segment, my camera started wigging out, not taking pictures but not retracting the lens either. So the state line marker had to be done with my camphone, which is really bad. I ended up scrapping the photo proof requirement so that I could actually play.

My notes and most of my documentation are scribbled on the bingo square. The winning squares: RV; someone on the shoulder [@ about 103 mi marker someone w/ a trailer platform; @ 89.8 mi marker, a woman getting something out of the trunk of her red sedan--and no, we didn't stop to help either of them]; free space; road kill [approx 70 mi marker, something smaller than a deer but not sure what--a big raccoon?; then at 36 mi marker, definitely a raccoon]; and a state line marker, the bad camphone pic of the Missouri sign.

Documentation photos that made it for this proof: a wind farm, hay bales, a casino sign, the vulgar convenience store name (Kum & Go), an RV, and a bonus flag in the convenience store shot that I didn't count since I used a flag by McDonald's in Story City IA. I saw an oversize load on a truck but didn't count it because it was before I started, and I didn't count the signs for the free wifi at Iowa rest areas b/c I never managed to snap a view of them, much less use the wifi.

Auto bingo worked! The trip through Iowa was even quicker playing auto bingo than I remembered from our family trips when I was a kid 25 or so years ago. Nothing could make those car rides go by fast enough, not even my auto bingo.