Z is for The Dreaded Z

Long before the invention and acquisition of iPods, laptops and pounding your brother, we played car games on long trips.

You likely know these games. 

Punchbuggy is a favourite amongst my sons – at least until the bruising and bleeding begins. 

I Spy was OK until car manufacturers painted the interior of automobiles uniformly grey and that kinda took some of the spark out of it.

Another of our favourites is the Alphabet Road Sign Game. 

Here's how it works: Someone, usually the loudest and most obnoxious enthusiastic child, starts with the letter A. He has to find a road sign with the letter A in it and read the word out loud. So there's a sign up ahead for Anne St. He says, "Anne St.," usually at an ear-piercing volume and usually directly in my ear.

The next child looks for a letter B, I look for a C, Dave looks for a D, and then it comes back to the starter for E and winds its way through the alphabet until the final letter is found.

Simple, huh?

It is for some letters. A, for example, is dead easy. So is R and S and T. X is one of the easiest letters because speed limit signs all say maximum.

B isn't as common as you might think and the letters J and Q are as scarce as hen's teeth. Your only hope for Q is an antique shop and you wanna hope there's one of those JESUS SAVES signs along the way if you want a J.

They're so hard to find, in fact, that we call them "The Dreaded J" or "The Dreaded Q."

There is one other letter that is "dreaded" and that is "The Dreaded Z."

If you're going through town, it's no sweat – just find yourself a pizza shop and you're good to go.

If not, you can drive a long, long way to find a Z. There have been times when someone in the car has woot-wooted in excitement just because we entered a Construction Zone.

Today, though, I am not dreading the letter Z. 

This post brings to an end an entire month of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

I did it, I did it! I posted every day in the month of April, except Sunday, with a different letter of the alphabet featured in each post.

Was it hard? Nah... not really. Then again, I didn't have a format to worry about. I just blathered about anything and then fit the letter with the blathering.

Was it fun? Yes! It was! The best thing about the challenge was visiting so many of the other participants, finding new blogs to love and follow, and discovering more followers for my blog. There's no way I could visit every participant – at last count there were 1,282 bloggers. 

Isn't that crazy? I know!

If you'd like to check out the Linky list, press the green A-Z badge on the right side of my blog. There's some good reading to be found and some really cool people.

Hey, I really do recommend the Alphabet Road Sign Game. It encourages young readers, it makes the car ride seem shorter and it requires no batteries.

Happy trails.