feelin' red, white, and blue

(aka, Emily's car game)

I drove to my parents on Friday, the day after Independence Day. I spent the first half of the car ride talking to a good friend, catching up on what's been going on in her life. After I, got off the phone I started noticing cars grouped together in some combination of red, white and blue. I decided to make a game of it and count how many times I saw some combo of those colors.

Here are the rules: the cars do not have to be in color order, but they must not be separated by any other color car. Say you see a white car, the next car has to either be red or blue. If it's any other color you have to start over.

I even went as far as seeing a red and white car, but if a green car was passing a blue car and the blue one was not right behind that white car, I didn't count it.

It's a four hour drive total.

I had already spent half of it on the phone and not playing this game.

In the last two hours I saw sixteen sets.

I thought that was pretty impressive.

Or a coincidence since I had Independence Day on the brain.

When I left this morning, I was debating on whether or not I should play it again.

Then I saw a set of the three colors and decided I should see how many I could count on the way home.

I got up to twenty-four! And there were a few times there were so many cars (holy mass exodus from the lakeshore back to Chicago) that I couldn't keep track. That, and I was trying to drive my car.

I didn't count the color if it was questionable. There are a lot of blues out there and a lot of black cars that could have been a deep blue. Nor did silver/gray blue count. I didn't count silver, it had to be white. I didn't count two-tone cars. I may have been more lenient on the red, but for the most part stuck to the true flag colors. If you can believe that!

I didn't count my own car (it's blue) if there was a red and white in front of me. There were a couple of times when there would also be another blue car. Mostly I counted the cars in the oncoming traffic, so I didn't double count any on my side.

It's a fun game and I recommend you try it next time you have a long car ride. Everyone wins, because everyone is counting. Let me know if you discover the same thing, there are lots of red, white and blue cars being driven, or if you change it up and look for different color combinations?!