My parents pointed us to this article in the Mercury News that is both a fun guideline for a vacation as well as a contest if you can document doing or seeing all of these things:
1. Covered bridge
2. Church with visible bell
3. Sign that is intentionally or unintentionally funny
4. Black bear (not from the wild)
5. Lemonade stand
6. Water tower with writing on it
7. Festival celebrating food, vegetable or fruit
8. House that doesn’t have four sides
9. Mime
10. Someone feeding pigeons
11. Ice cream truck
12. Motel named for two people (i.e. Norma Dan Motel, Tenn.)
13. Obscure historical marker
14. Parked car with more than 10 bumper stickers? (Must be parked!)
15. Building painted purple
16. Blank billboard
17. Closed store with “We’ve moved” sign
18. Ferris wheel
19. Rainbow
20. Something unusual not on the list
Tie-breaker: How many participating teams do you think will find all 20 items?
Traveling overseas?
(You can sub out these for any three above; substitutions must be from a location outside of the United States or U.S. territories.)
1. Sign that includes foreign words and name of U.S. state
2. Windmill
3. Outdoor market selling food indigenous to that area
Consider that our upcoming vacation will take us north into Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Alberta I think we’ve got a great shot at a lot of these, including the “overseas” section in Canada.
We’re slated to travel all the way to Edmonton, so we’ve already have mapped our several “finds” for this list. The West Edmonton Mall has an amusement park with a Ferris wheel, for example. And we’re definitely stopping at Yellowstone Bear World for a little bear watching too.
As we check things off our list I’ll update this post with status updates. When we’re back from vacation we’ll have the full list of photos.