Heading off on holiday with young kids in tow can be challenging, to put it mildly. I Spy is unlikely to do the trick for the whole journey, while iPads and iPhones lead to too much screen time and car sickness. Catherine Milford investigates a game that can keep the whole family entertained as you drive this Easter holiday.
Anyone who’s ever undertaken a roadie with kids knows it so well. “Are we nearly there yet?” “I’m booooored,” “I feel sick,” “I need the toilet,” “Freddie’s punching me, Mum!” The joys of travelling with kids are…well, let’s call it ‘unique’. I distinctly remember one trip where we literally hadn’t pulled out of the driveway before we got our first ‘Are we nearly there?’.
This Easter holidays, hundreds of parents will be loading up their caravans or motorhomes, locking the kids into place in their seats with books, toys, games – whatever they can find to keep them entertained. (Spoiler alert – it’ll last about 10 minutes.)
While screens are often the invention of choice to keep kids quiet on long journeys, there are of course several downsides. Not only will it lead to potential travel sickness if they are continually looking down, but it also means that the kids are missing
the joys of the journey. New Zealand has a number of weird and wonderful sights: who can forget the infamous Cardrona bra fence, the Taihape giant gumboot, the shearer statue of Te Kuiti, and, more recently, the ‘love locks’ padlock fence in Auckland’s downtown area? If you ask kids these days, they are more likely to tell you about the latest Xbox game than the most iconic landmark in Paeroa.
Having fun with the family, and each other, on your road trip is a big part of the holiday, and it’s a great time to actually interact with family, which is why Cat Macnaughtan came up with the idea of inventing a game that turns the journey into an interactive adventure. “I started as a travel blog seven years ago, after a combination of life events meant I started experiencing the world in an entirely new way, and discovering some pretty off-the-beaten tracks,” says Cat.
Then, in 2018, Cat and her husband James received a message from someone who had been following the blog. “The family had moved to Waiouru from South Africa and wanted to know what we could recommend in the area – and we were stumped,” says Cat. “They’d done the Army Museum, but there’s really only so many times you can sit on a replica cannon; surely there must be more to explore in the area?” But no trip guide Cat found could provide any information on what else was there: places to have a picnic, water holes, streams, places to spot horses; nowhere you could just ‘be’.
“I remember moving to Wellington as a graduate and being so desperately homesick I went out one day to explore; to basically get lost,” she says. “I drove for an hour from my flat, through the myriad of one-way streets…and ended up back at home, having seen nothing interesting. My own psychological restrictions, along with Google knowing what we like so well that it predicts what we want without us even knowing it, meant it was really hard to just ‘let go’ and get lost.”
So Cat got busy. “I wrote a series of rules around what would enable someone to find new places, and essentially override the ‘presets’ we automatically follow,” she says. “I took Waioru as the most extreme example, and the rules were that it had to be offline, portable, truly random, able to be played repeatedly, have a few smarts so you didn’t go in circles, be simple to play and be fun for both adults and kids.”
And so Getting Lost was created. She started with the Adventurers Edition, which includes some basic directions like, “Get on a main road, take the third exit’; and ‘Follow a blue car’. The game now has 16 different editions, including the Camper Edition, Girls’ Road Trip, Out of Town, Date Night and even a Dog’s Edition. “Of course, no-one can ever guarantee a once-in-a-lifetime experience every time, but even in places you know, you’ll find new and exciting things,” says Cat. “The game is about the journey, and taking random roads you’ve never been down; a giant bottle of cream, an army tanker in a field, dolphins at sunset, a letterbox made entirely of Lego…these are things that are all out there, but you won’t find them anywhere in a trip guide.”
Getting Lost’s CEO and founder Cat has now sold more than 50,000 copies of the popular road game, both in New Zealand and overseas. Their Facebook page has 50,000 followers, and Cat regularly gets suggestions for more misdirections for new games. Getting Lost is particularly popular in America, where the Date Night and Adventurers Editions have really taken off; she says she’s also found particular success with families with autistic children. “People with autism have told me that for the first time they feel they are allowed to lose control, because they can hand it over to the cards. They feel free.”
