EVENT PLANNING ORGANIZATION

Event planning is the process of planning a festival, ceremony, competition, party, concert, or convention. Event planning includes budgeting, establishing dates and alternate dates, selecting and reserving the event site, acquiring permits, and coordinating transportation and parking. Event planning also includes some or all of the following, depending on the event: developing a theme or motif for the event, arranging for speakers and alternate speakers, coordinating location support (such as electricity and other utilities), arranging decor, tables, chairs, tents, event support and security, catering, police, fire, portable toilets, parking, signage, emergency plans, health care professionals, and cleanup.

Steps to planning an event

The first step to planning an event is determining its purpose, whether it is for a wedding, company, birthday, festival, graduation or any other event requiring extensive planning.

From this, the event planner needs to choose entertainment, location, guest list, speakers, and content. The location for events is endless, but with event planning they would likely be held at hotels, convention centers, reception halls, or outdoors depending on the event. Once the location is set the coordinator/planner needs to prepare the event with staff, set up the entertainment, and keep contact with the client.

After all this is set the event planner has all the smaller details to address like set up of the event such as food, drinks, music, guest list, budget, advertising and marketing, decorations, all this preparation is what is needed for an event to run smoothly.

An event planner needs to be able to manage their time wisely for the event, and the length of preparation needed for each event so it is a success.

Event planning as a career

Event planning is a relatively new career field. There is now training that helps one trying to break into the career field. There must be training for an event planner to handle all the pressure and work efficiently. This career deals with a lot of communication and organization aspects. There are many different names for an event planner such as a conference coordinator, a convention planner, a special event coordinator, and a meeting manager.

Event planners' work is considered either stressful or energizing. This line of work is also considered fast paced and demanding. Planners face deadlines and communicating with multiple people at one time. Planners spend most of their time in offices, but when meeting with clients the work is usually on-site at the location where the event is taking place. Some physical activity is required such as carrying boxes of materials and decorations or supplies needed for the event. Also, long working hours can be a part of the job. The day the event is taking place could start as early as 5:00 a.m. and then work until midnight. Working on weekends is sometimes required, which is when many events take place.

Sustainable Event Management

Sustainable event management (also known as event greening) is the process used to produce an event with particular concern for environmental, economic and social issues. Sustainability in event management incorporates socially and environmentally responsible decision making into the planning, organization and implementation of, and participation in, an event. It involves including sustainable development principles and practices in all levels of event organization, and aims to ensure that an event is hosted responsibly. It represents the total package of interventions at an event, and needs to be done in an integrated manner. Event greening should start at the inception of the project, and should involve all the key role players, such as clients, organizers, venues, sub-contractors and suppliers.

Event Planning or management is most probably similar in analogy to planning a typical birthday party, where the preparations need to be set up in the most effective ways. However, there are more intimate details in event management that needs to be paid close attention to.

Nowadays, the term Event manager seems to refer to an easy yet sophisticated and chic profession. Yet in actuality, there are consequences and accountabilities that are attached to this classy title of being a service provider. The name suggests the job profile of an event manager involves organizing a special affair. Concepts have to be visualized, planned, budgeted, and executed in events that are often highly regarded such as fashion or beauty shows, concerts, corporate seminars, exhibitions, wedding celebrations, theme parties, product launching, etc.

What is good about this career and its gaining popularity is the minimal requirement for financial investments, yet it allows the planner to be independent and flexible. Personal traits, character and attitude are of more importance in event planning. The planner of events must possess a real passion in holding or conducting affairs, they need to be organized and able to work in flexible and often extended hours. Although this exciting career among the younger generation may have been seen as a sensational one, it also demands a substantial amount of hard work and effort. Perfection is a major quality that must be achieved in any event management and therefore requires a great quantity of patience, good communication skills and comprehension to be practiced by an event manager. Duties must be discharged with efficiency, challenges must be confidently faced and situations must be given due attention and reaction. Team spirit, leadership and organizational skills are as well required in event planning. Every detail no matter how minute must be paid close attention to.

There are also courses available to be taken by anyone who decides on taking a career in event planning. Eligibility courses usually require to have a bachelor's degree in any discipline but most preferred are management-related fields, social sciences, liberal arts and humanities. Individuals who are of interest simply have to finish these courses that are offered in many academic institutional and universities. Short term certificates as well as post graduate MBA courses may also be taken. Major areas of principles and techniques must also be mastered to effectively perform and execute the duties of an event planner. These principles include public relations, organizational development, communication and implementation.

Training and experience also contribute in becoming an adept and qualified event manager. While at school, the aspirant may work as an event staff personnel for sporting festivals and leagues. If there are local music shows to be held, assist in the preparation. Internships also play a major role in molding a successful planner.

                                                                                                         Renee de Ramirez MS

                                                                                                            Event Planner Expert 

                                                                                                        www.reneederamirez.net

HOW TO PREPARE A BANQUETTE SERVICE * SERVER RESPONSABILITIES

A banquet server is responsible for preparing the tables and banquet area before guests arrive, effectively serving a number of different dishes and courses to guests during a meal, and clearing the tables and banquet area after the guests depart. Banquets are most often held at hotels, resorts, or private clubs for large events and parties. This means that there may be 100 or more guests to be efficiently and pleasantly served during the course of an event. A banquet server effectively tends to those needs, with duties similar to a restaurant waiter but working in a more team-focused way.

The responsibilities of a banquet server begin before the guests arrive. Prior to the event beginning, servers will prepare the banquet area for the event. This typically involves setting out linens on tables, setting silverware and napkins on the tables, as well as preparing anything else that may eventually be set at the tables, such as salt, pepper, or bread and rolls. While a banquet server will not necessarily cook or prepare any of the food, he or she should become familiar with the menu and the dishes being served to better assist guests with questions about the meal.

During the actual event, a banquet server is responsible for the serving of the various dishes and courses. These are typically served beginning with the women at a table, and serving dishes from the left side of a guest. After a dish is finished, the empty plates or bowls should be removed from the right side so that further dishes can come in from the left. Between courses, banquet servers are often responsible for keeping glasses full of water or any other beverages being served. This continues throughout the meal until the final course has been served and finally cleared away from the tables.

After the guests depart, a banquet server will then work to clear away all dishes or glasses left at the tables. These are brought by the servers to the dish washing stations for dishwashers to clean. A banquet server is then responsible for clearing away anything else from the tables, such as linens or table decorations to finish the event.

Banquet servers typically need to be able to work together to see an entire event successfully completed and ensure the satisfaction of every guest in the room. They often need excellent customer service skills and the ability to multitask to assist multiple guests at any given time. Some employers will also insist that a banquet server be 21 years of age to be able to serve alcoholic beverages to guests, depending on state liquor laws.

What Does a Room Service Server Do?

A room service server may have many different responsibilities. The servers usually report to a room service manager while working. They are expected to restock items, take orders, and deliver those orders to each room at a hotel or lodge. The room service server may also have to help with other areas of the hotel when room service orders are slow. 

When the room service servers begins their shifts, they will most likely have to check in with the manager and then start preparing for the day. Preparation could include restocking the kitchen with food items, condiments, and eating utensils. Most hotel servers have a cart to run the food from room to room, which may need to be restocked as well. 

The hotel guests will call the room service server to place an order. The server will take the food order and hand it off to the kitchen. After the kitchen staff prepares the food, the server will then place it on the cart and deliver the order to the correct room. 

Once the order is delivered to the room, the room service server will go over the order with the hotel guest to be sure it is correct. The server will also take items off the cart and place them neatly on the room table. He is usually expected to be polite and build a good rapport with hotel guests. When guests are done with their food trays, the server is responsible for picking up the dirty dishes and bringing them back to the kitchen. 

Room service employees are also expected to keep the hotel minibars and snack items stocked in each room. If a guest has a special request, the server may also have to fulfill those demands as well. The room service server can also help serve food in the hotel restaurant or bar when it is especially busy. 

Since the room service server has so many duties, he often has to have prior experience to get a job in a hotel. Hotel employers look for people who have customer service skills or have had a job serving customers within the food industry. Servers should also be neat in appearance and have a pleasant attitude with the customers and the other hotel employees.

Room service employees are often paid an hourly wage or yearly salary and receive tips from the hotel guests. A full-time server may be eligible for medical and other benefits offered by the employer. Servers can typically make a good living if they work hard and please their guests. 

Renee de Ramirez MS

Congress, Banquets and Conventions Expert
Look for me on LinkedIn: Renee de Ramirez MS
www.reneederamirez.net 

THE ARTS AROUND THE WORLD

Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus Bavaria, ca. 1895

The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many endeavors (or art forms) united by their employment of the human creative impulse. The term implies a broader range of disciplines than "art", which in modern usage usually refers only to the visual arts. The other major constituents of the arts are the literary arts, more often called literature – including poetry, novels and short stories, among others – and the performing arts, among them music, dance, magic, theater, opera and film.  Literary arts and creative writing are actually interchangeable terms. These divisions are by no means absolute as there are art forms which combine a visual element with performance (e.g. film) and the written word (e.g. comics). This list is by no means comprehensive, but only meant to introduce the concept of the arts.

Whether or not a form of creative endeavor can be considered one of "the arts" can be contentious due to the cultural values attached in Western culture to the term "art", which can imply that it is a field elevated above popular culture.

Definition

Collins English Dictionary defines 'the arts' as "imaginative, creative, and nonscientific branches of knowledge considered collectively, esp. as studied academically". The singular term art is defined by the Irish Art Encyclopedia as follows: "Art is created when an artist creates a beautiful object, or produces a stimulating experience that is considered by his audience to have artistic merit." So, one could conclude that art is the process that leads to a product (the artwork or piece of art), which is then examined and analyzed by experts or simply enjoyed by those who appreciate it. The same source states:

Art is a global activity which encompasses a host of disciplines, as evidenced by the range of words and phrases which have been invented to describe its various forms. Examples of such phraseology include: Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, Visual Arts, Decorative Arts, Applied Arts, Design, Crafts, Performing Arts, and so on.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, United States

The term art commonly refers to the "Visual Arts", as an abbreviation of creative art or fine art. For example, the history of art is described as "the history of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. It is the history of one of the fine arts, others of which are the performing arts and the literature. It is also one of the humanities. The term sometimes encompasses theory of the visual arts, including aesthetics." In the article for fine art, we read:

Confusion often occurs when people mistakenly refer to the Fine Arts but mean the Performing Arts (Music, Dance, Drama, etc.). However, there is some disagreement here: e.g., at York University (Toronto, Canada) Fine Arts is a faculty that includes Dance, Design, Digital Media, Film, Music, Theater and Visual Arts. Furthermore, creative writing is frequently considered a fine art as well.

To illustrate the previous statements, the College of Fine Arts at Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, TX) consists of the Schools of "Art, Music and Theatre", while one of the Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees at the University of British Columbia is attached to the Creative Writing Program. More work would be required to standardize the use of the terms "art" and "fine art", but for the purpose of this article the definition of "the arts" is not problematic, because it includes all the arts. One artist has even suggested that "[it] would really simplify matters if we could all just stick with visual, auditory, performance or literary – when we speak of The Arts – and eliminate “Fine” altogether".

History

For all intents and purposes, the history of the arts begins with the history of art, as dealt with elsewhere. Furthermore, the history of the Performing Arts and Literature have been described in other articles --(Please see: Outline of performing arts; History of literature; prehistoric music). Some examples of creative art through the ages can be summarized here, as excerpted from the history of art.

The arts might have origins in early human evolutionary prehistory. According to a recent suggestion, several forms of audio and visual arts (rhythmic singing and drumming on external objects, dancing, body and face painting) were developed very early in hominid evolution by the forces of natural selection in order to reach an altered state of consciousness. In this state, which Jordania calls battle trance, hominids and early human were losing their individuality, and were acquiring a new collective identity, where they were not feeling fear or pain, and were religiously dedicated to the group interests, in total disregards of their individual safety and life. This state was needed to defend early hominids from predators, and also to help to obtain food by aggressive scavenging. Ritualistic actions involving heavy rhythmic music, rhythmic drill, coupled sometimes with dance and body painting had been universally used in traditional cultures before the hunting or military sessions in order to put them in a specific altered state of consciousness and raise the morale of participants. More generally, evolutionary psychology and applications in fields such as evolutionary musicology, Darwinian literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics have given several different explanations for the evolutionary origins of the arts.

Ancient Greek art saw the veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.

An artist pallette

Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The physical and rational certainties depicted by the Enlightenment in the late 17th and 18th centuries were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein, the development of the quantum mechanics —in the words of Richard Feynman, quantum mechanics deals with "nature as She is, absurd"— and of unseen psychology by Freud[2], but also by unprecedented technological development. Paradoxically the expressions of new technologies were greatly influenced by the ancient tribal arts of Africa and Oceania, through the works of Paul Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists, Pablo Picasso and the Cubists, as well as the Futurists and others.

Disciplines

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Catullus - at - Lesbia's 1865

In the Middle Ages, the Artes Liberales (liberal arts) were taught in universities as part of the Trivium —an introductory curriculum involving grammar, rhetoric, and logic - and of the Quadrivium —a curriculum involving the “mathematical arts” of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts, such as vestiaria -tailoring, weaving-, agricultura -agriculture-, architectura -architecture, masonry-, militia and venatoria -warfare and hunting, "martial arts"-, mercatura -trade, commerce-, coquinaria -cooking-, and metallaria -blacksmithing, metallurgy —division made, somewhat arbitrarily, by Johannes Scotus Eriugena, already in the 9th century) were practiced and developed in guild environments. The modern distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" skills did not develop until the Renaissance.

In modern academia, the arts are usually grouped with or as a subset of the Humanities. Some subjects in the Humanities are history, linguistics, literature, and philosophy. Newspapers typically include a section on the arts.

Traditionally, the arts are classified as seven although the list has been expanded to nine. These being Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Poetry, Dance, Theater/Cinema, with the modern additions of Photography and Comics.

Visual arts

Drawing

Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftswoman or draughtsman.

Architecture

The Parthenon on top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. The word architecture comes from the Greek arkhitekton, "master builder, director of works," from αρχι- (arkhi) "chief" + τεκτων (tekton) "builder, carpenter".

A wider definition would include the design of the total built environment, from the macrolevel of town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture to the microlevel of creating furniture. Architectural design usually must address both feasibility and cost for the builder, as well as function and aesthetics for the user.

Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728

In modern usage, architecture is the art and discipline of creating an actual, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of any complex object or system. The term can be used to connote the implied architecture of abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers, enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the elements or components of some kind of structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components.

Planned architecture manipulates space, volume, texture, light, shadow, or abstract elements in order to achieve pleasing aesthetics. This distinguishes it from applied science or engineering, which usually concentrate more on the functional and feasibility aspects of the design of constructions or structures.

In the field of building architecture, the skills demanded of an architect range from the more complex, such as for a hospital or a stadium, to the apparently simpler, such as planning residential houses. Many architectural works may be seen also as cultural and political symbols, and/or works of art. The role of the architect, though changing, has been central to the successful (and sometimes less than successful) design and implementation of pleasingly built environments in which people live.

 Painting

The Mona Lisa, is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the West world

Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a vehicle (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood panel or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.

Colour is the essence of painting as sound is of music. Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Newton, have written their own colour theory. Moreover the use of language is only an abstraction for a colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalized register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C#, although the Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.

Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with Cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet or Anselm Kiefer.

Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text. However, through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, its popular usage, particularly in the UK, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practise the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.

Video games

A debate exists in the fine arts and video game cultures over whether video games can be counted as an art form.^. Some cite games such as Shadow of the Colossus, Myst and Journey as prime examples of video games as an art form.  Others, such as game designer Hideo Kojima, profess that video games are a type of service, not an art form.  In May 2011, the National Endowment of the Arts included video games in its redefinition of what is considered a work of art.

Literary arts

Shakespeare wrote some of the best known works in English literature.

Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun "literature" comes from the Latin word littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)". The term has generally come to identify a collection of writings, which in Western culture are mainly prose (both fiction and non-fiction), drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, the artistic linguistic expression can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and as folktale.

Performing arts

Between the Plastic Arts and the Performing Arts there are some methodological differences. To create its artistic purpose, that generally is an experience, the performing artist mainly uses its own body, face, or presence. The artistic purpose of a plastic artist normally is an object, and she or he uses materials (such as clay, metal or paint) to create it.

Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic, music, opera, operetta, film, juggling, martial arts, marching arts such as brass bands and theatre.

Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, magicians, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by the services of other artists or essential workers, such as songwriting and stagecraft.

Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and stage makeup, etc.

There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists perform their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Dance was often referred to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.

Music

A musical score by Mozart

Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their reproduction in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art.

Theatre

Theatre or theater (from Greek theatron —θέατρον—, from theasthai, "behold") is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera and mummers' plays.

 

Dance

A Ballroom dance exhibition

Dance (from Old French dancer [verb], dance [noun], of unknown origin) generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting.

Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, mating dance), motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind), and certain musical forms or genres.  Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer. People danced to relieve stress.

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while Martial arts 'kata' are often compared to dances.

Gastronomy

Gastronomy is the study of the relationship between culture and food. It is often thought erroneously that the term gastronomy refers exclusively to the art of cooking (see Culinary art), but this is only a small part of this discipline; it cannot always be said that a cook is also a gourmet. Gastronomy studies various cultural components with food as its central axis. Thus it is related to the Fine Arts and Social Sciences, and even to the Natural Sciences in terms of human nutritious activity and digestive function.

Renee de Ramirez, MS

Master Degree Arts and Letters

Critic of Arts

HOW TO ENJOY A CAR TRIP?

Hate long car trips with the family? 

Well, here are a few ways to avoid singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall" with Mom and Dad! 

1. Watch movies. A lot of people buy fancy DVD players for their cars, and end up using them once a year! But you don't need a DVD player for watching movies, all you need is a laptop (that plays DVD's), a laptop charger, and a DC-AC Converter. A DC-AC converter takes the power from your cigarette lighter to a normal AC Power outlet. So on the trip, your laptop will have full battery. Plug the DC-AC Converter into the cigarette lighter, plug your laptop charger into the DC-AC converter, then plug the Laptop charger to the Laptop and voilà! You have a DVD player!

2.  Listen to music. Who doesn't like music? A nice way to listen to music without continually switching CDs is to buy a car cassette adapter for an iPod. All you do is plug it in to the headphone jack and put the cassette into your cassette player and you will have music filling your car. If you have a car with no cassette player, you can use an FM transmitter. An FM transmitter is a device you plug into your MP3 player and all you do is set a radio station on the device and any radio a few yards away can hear the music coming from your MP3 Player to the desired radio station. Or if you want to listen privately you can do so very easily by listening via headphones.

3.Read a Book. Books can be a best friend. They can take you to places that you may never see. They can introduce you to things you may never know... But do you know how to read them in order to get the fullest enjoyment possible? This should help. 

 Find a book. Look in the library or in one of the larger bookstores. You could also ask friends if you could check out their book shelves. Search the shelves until you find a book that looks good. Read the first page to see how it reads, and the cover text at the back of the book if it has any. If you find yourself already engrossed, then buy it or check it out.

 4.  Play games. Some car games are addictive and some can be quite boring. Take your pick:

• The Name Game: Someone thinks of a letter and you go in a circle, saying a name that begins with that letter. The one who can't find a name first loses.
• Scavenger Hunt: Each passenger makes a list of things to find during a trip, such as a red house or a certain type of car. They switch lists and look for everything on each of them. The game can be challenging if you make it that way!
• Ghost: Someone starts with naming a letter, the next person has to name a letter also, but it has to be in the order of a real word. The one who finishes the word loses. If you think someone is just saying random letters, you can challenge them. Once you do that, if the person says a real word they were spelling, the person who challenged them would be out. If the challenging was successful, the person who got challenged would be out.
• The License Plate Game: A group of people try to find abbreviations for the 3 letters on a license plate. Such as a license plate that had the letters BFH: you could say "Big Fat Hippo!"
• The License Plate Game #2: This is another version of The License Plate Game. You find a license plate and make a word out of the 3 letters by adding letters in-between the letters. The letters have to be in order! So if you see a license plate that goes CMA you can say, "Camera!" or "Coma!"
• The License Plate Game #3: This is also another version of The License Plate Game. When someone sees a license that is from another state they say the state and punch the other person playing. (Remember not to punch too hard!)
• 20 Questions: One person thinks of a noun and another person tries to guess it in under 20 "Yes or No" questions.
• Yes and No: Simple- one person tries to make another person say yes or no.
• Casserole: A game where a person tells a story, and during the story they have to say "casserole!" Once the person says casserole, all the people listening have to say "casserole." The first one to say it gets to start another story.
• Three Words: You first pick a category, like animals or sports. All the people playing have to choose a subject from that category, like soccer, or football. Then you pick a person to be "It". The person being "It" must say someone else's subject three times before the other person says their subject. If the "It" person says the subject 3 times before the person with that subject says it, then the person will be "It". However if the "It" person says the subject 3 times during the person with that subject saying their subject, the "It" person remains "It".
• I Spy: One person looks for an object inside or outside the car. After they find an object they say "I spy with my little eye something that begins with...". Then you have to say the first letter of the object. The first person who finds out the object is "It".
• Honey If You Love Me... : In this game one person is supposed to ask another person in the funniest way "Honey, I love you, won't you please, please smile?" And the other person without smiling or laughing must say : "Honey, I love you, but I just can't smile". As easy at it seems, it is really hard to not laugh, especially if you play with a group of the same gender as you.
• Sign Game: All you have to do is find the letters of your name, one by one by looking at billboards, signs, or posters. First to find all the letters in their name wins! You must find them in order of your name! So, if your name is Colin you must find them like C-O-L-I-N not L-I-C-O-N.
• Alphabet Signs: Look at signs or licence plates on the way and try to find the letters A-Z. The first person to get there wins, and the once a letter has been found somewhere, it can't be used from that location again
• Picnic Game: The first player starts off by saying "I'm bringing A____ (a word that starts with the letter A, most likely a food product but not necessarily) to the picnic". The second player then repeats the A word and adds something that starts with B that they will bring to the picnic. The next player repeats both A and B, and adds a C. The game continues until the letter Z is reached and each player repeats the entire list correctly!
• Alphabet Conversation Alphabet conversation is a game that involves improvisation, which means thinking on the spot. The first player will start a conversation by starting a sentence with the beginning word the first letter of the alphabet. Then the 2nd player would respond to that with a sentence that starts with a word that starts with the 2nd letter of the alphabet and so on. No saying Ummmm... Or Hmmm.
• Words that Relate: This is usually played in internet forums as well. Someone chooses a word, and then someone next to them has to say another word that relates to that word. The next person has to say a word that relates to that word, and so on and so forth. To make it more challenging, you can make it so that you can't say the same word twice.

5.      TIPS

• For surround sound in the car for movies, plug the Car Cassette Adapter in the laptop.
• If you get serious motion sickness take a motion-sickness drug like Ginger. If you have Emetophobia, (fear of vomiting), you may get motion sickness and the fear together. Take a motion sickness drug to alleviate the problem. People with Emetophobia may also have a fear of other people vomiting; relieve their tension by assuring them you're not feeling carsick!
• Momsminivan.com Car Games for Kids - Includes lots of games and activities to play in the car with your kids on car trips to make the trip more enjoyable.
• Chewing Gum may help alleviate motion sickness symptoms while reading.

 6.     WARNINGS

• The driver of the car should not be watching the movie. If the sound of a movie bothers the driver in any way, the watchers should wear headphones. Distractions like noise can lead to accidents.
• Some of the games listed may give someone car sickness. Don't look down, read or write if you are prone to motion sickness; either ask someone else to keep score or toughen up your mental agility by remembering the scores in your mind.

 Renee de Ramirez, MS

Travel Planner Organizer