Licence Plate Photo Bingo - Travel Activity

 While we were on a trip to California several years ago doing the five park tour, (Click here to see how I won the trip)our friends that were traveling with us taught us a game. 

He wrote down all of the states including Hawaii and Alaska on a paper and each time we saw a license plate from a certain state, you put a check next to the state. As you can imagine, you would end up with lots of the same state being checked off many times but the trick is to get all the states at least once. 
We were all excited when we found Alaska but it wasn't until we were almost all the way home that we got Hawaii. We pulled into a gas station and there was a trailer with a custom car on it being pulled by another car and it had Hawaii License plates. We couldn't believe we got all but one or two of the states. 

Flash forward to our road trip a few weeks ago. We passed a car with an Alaska license plate on it. That took me back to the trip we took and the game we played. I suggested that we do it with the camera. So, Princess number six who was in the front seat got the camera out and started snapping pictures. She got many as we drove and when we stopped, she would check all the plates in the parking lots and gas stations. 

She hand wrote all the states but you should have heard us trying to name all the states. Kids were yelling out states faster than she could write but in the end, there were a few we were missing. Then we would see a plate and realize we had missed the state. 

It was funny because we were speeding up to a car and then would slow to it's speed and try to get a clear photo of the car plate and then speed up to the next car or truck. I had to tell the people following us what we were up to because we would go 80 mph and the 50 mph over and over trying to get good photos.

Once again, when we were on our way home, we got Hawaii. We couldn't be sure of the plate because we could only see the rainbow on it but the car had a hang loose sticker in the back window and another one at the top of the Hawaiian Islands but because of the plastic holder on the plate, we wrote the people a note just to make sure. We thought we could just make out the state at the bottom of the holder but wanted to be sure. 


We held the sign up to the window asking where the car was from. They said the car was from Hawaii and the people gave us a "thumbs up" sign. 

I found it interesting that most of the trucks were registered in Illinois, California or Maine. Must be big trucking states.

The weirder thing was that we got two different provinces in Canada, a U.S. Air-force registration and the best was about a mile from our destination, I look in the rear view and see a European plate! 

I tried my darnedest to catch that car when it passed me so I could get in front of it again to get a picture of the front plate as when they passed us, the back plate was from the U.S. My guess is that it would be illegal to have two different plates on a car but it did look like a European car so the plate probably came with the car and then had to register here. 

The game kept the kids occupied during our long drive and gave us all some fun. Princess six had lots and lots of photos to take home and show people the different plates of America. Who knew I'd even see something new?