Day Twelve

With heavy hearts we packed the car today and braced ourselves for a 6 hour journey. This made my given target for the day – being more spontaneous – more than a little tricky. It was hard to actually achieve this without bullying everybody into stopping, getting out of the car and partaking in some crazy whim of mine. Having tested the water a few times and been met with general disapproval, I relented.

Thankfully, I saw small opportunities to achieve my goal, and grabbed them. This included a moment where we stopped at a motorway service station, and I noticed a little cubby-hole filled with arcade games. I suggested we have a go at some, and thankfully everybody seemed to like the idea. We found this great Japanese 2-player game which involved sliding a handle left or right to get your character to avoid electric shocks or whatever. If you wanted you could be really mean and barge your competitor into point-losing situations, because both players’ handles were in the same slot, so you could simply use brute force to shove the other person’s handle along. It was a bit like 1-dimensional sumo wrestling. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, dear reader, but Katie and I had a whale of a time playing it. And I think it woke her up a lot, which was helpful as she was the sole driver among us on a 400 mile journey.

Conclusion: a successful day, I think, against the odds.