When I was little, our family used to take long road-trip vacations in our van, towing a trailer. Since my dad was a teacher, he had two months off in the summer, so we could take our time and drive to California or Florida. These trips were generally 6-8 hour days spent in the van, puncuated with quick stops at tourist attractions and KOAs. And, to get off topic, there's nothing like pulling up to a KOA when you're little and seeing both a swimming pool AND an arcade - HEAVEN!
ANYWAY, we had the full-sized dodge van - none of these puny little mini-vans for our family. In the 80s, long before the advent of car seats, baby helmets and the like, we were allowed to be out of our seats and lying down on the giant carpeted floor space between the middle seats and the back of the van. I think that my dad carpeted this himself - so it was an awesomly comfortable shag from time to time (depending on the van, and on what was cheap at the carpet store I guess).
One of my favourite passtimes whist relegated to the back of the van was to have smash-up derbies with my Hot Wheels cars. I usually had about 16-20 cars with me. The rules are pretty easy - take two cars, one in each hand - point them at eachother, then smash them together. If one car remains on its wheels while the other turns over, that car wins. The cars faced off in a best of 3 match.
So, off I would go, setting up the initial bracket for my derby championship. The cars would face off, and half would be eliminated. This would continue until there was one car left. The champion, you say? Not even close!
That would only waste about half an hour. When you're driving through Montana, you need to kill a lot more time than that. The winning car would be put aside, and the remaining cars would then face off in a renewed bracket. The losing finalist from the previous round would get a bye to future smash-up rounds. It was all very complicated.
Eventually, I'd be down to 2 cars left that hadn't managed to win. These were generally the ugly Motorhome, the Bubble Gunner (both pictured below), or the tractor part of a semi that had lost its trailer. This one lost all the time because it was so light and top-heavy. Also, I didn't like it all that much.
There were actually two motorhomes, but one of them had all the paint chipped off, so I repainted it in red - the tires, windows, body, etc and called it he Devil Mobile. It fared a lot better - it must have been heavier due to all that extra paint - because I'm not really all that good at being light with a paintbrush. Especially with my sausage fingers.
Back to the competition... it would go on and on for hours, until there was one definite winner - the champion of champions. It was usually this awesome Ferrari Key Car. I think it was a combination of the car's wedge shape and the fact that I always wanted it to win. I think that I would press down on the car really hard in an effort to get that wedge-shaped hood under the wheels of the other cars. In the 80s, the Ferrari Testarossa was the ultimate in coolness, especially if you like Magnum PI. My dad still has the car at his house - I should maybe steal it and re-enact the derby championship.
Of course, if my kids tried to do that, I'm sure that I would yell at them to keep the noise down and go do something else.
