Alphabet Day: a game for your day, your road trip, or time with your kids

Jay Bell

Having more fun with the alphabet than I ever had playing crossword puzzles

Our version of this game started with a summer sunrise, but it can be completed in a normal day.

​Sometimes you have those days that are pretty wide open: no long list of chores, no big plans, maybe you’re on vacation with a light itinerary for the day. We found ourselves with such a day recently when we were on vacation, and weren’t sure how to spend it. So, just like my friends and I would do as kids, we invented a game, complete with rules and everything.
 
The rules were simple: do whatever we wanted, but find letters that the activities correspond to. The goal was to do stuff that touched on every letter of the alphabet. Intimidating? Nope. This didn’t require doing 26 different things, just doing stuff that involved words starting with all those letters. That meant one activity could score more than one letter. Ready, set, go!

"A... for Abandoned."

​This had the potential to be a stressful challenge that could leave us feeling over-programmed. But we started with a couple of things we definitely wanted to do, a possibility or two, and an assumption we’d find other stuff along the way. We opened up a new Note on my iPhone and marked down letters and words as we went along. If things were duplicates, we didn’t worry in the moment. We figured we’d sort stuff out later in the day and see what was left to tackle.

We wound up having a blast. It was a way to frame our day. It also led us to observe things we might have otherwise missed. And it also provided its own unique laughs. For example, when we went to visit a historical society and they didn’t show up to open their building, we declared we’d been “A… abandoned!” (Sigh.) 

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Hog Island was a good pitstop for lunch, an "I.P.A.", and to take stock of our results so far.

​Conversely, when we went to a local brewery to have lunch and assess what we’d accomplished and what we had left to do, we proudly realized we could declare a trifecta, as we were drinking an “I-P-A”. We spontaneously hit a flea market, and I wound up with a $2 book by one of my favorite authors, eventually needing his N for Novel. And when we thought we wouldn’t come up with an X word, we thought about using Q for Quit. However, we’d learned earlier from a tour guide about the sappy pine trees that were pervasive in our area, and discovered that Xylem is like a tree’s artery, moving the sap through the tree. That became the final letter that gave us the win.

We stumbled across this farmers market. The natural popsicle was tasty and memorialized as our "P".

​While we played this on a vacation day, and could start the day off before dawn watching a sunrise at the beach, it can be done anywhere. If your summer trips are over and you’re out of ideas for the kids while awaiting the start of the new school year, you can go at it the same way. If you’re a couple staying home for the weekend, it might be a way to discover some new things in your neck of the woods. Our longest activities were about an hour, from our sunrise at the ocean to a tour at an historical society (not the one that didn’t open on time). By contrast, the shortest was about five minutes as we snagged some seltzer water at the Eastham Superette.
 
It doesn’t really matter if you finish, just as long as you have fun in the attempt. Here are our final results, to give you an idea of how random the letters were. Start to finish, we were gone for about nine hours, making it a full day but still fine.

RESULTS
Atlantic Ocean
Beach glass
Conservation Trust (a nature trail)
Driftwood
Eastham Superette
Farmers Market
Guided tour
Historical Society
I.P.A.
Jetty
Ketchup
Lighthouse
Marsh
Novel
Outermost Brewery
Popsicle
Queen Anne’s Lace (flower all around downtown Wellfleet)
One Room Schoolhouse
Sunrise
Conservation Trust
Uncle Tim’s Bridge
Visitors Center
Wellfleet
Xylem (who knew science was exciting?)
Yarrow flower
Zucchini

This bouy pyramid on a town green didn't wind up being used for a letter. But it was still a fun find, and we'd never have checked out if we weren't playing this game.

Walking among shops, we noticed plenty of Queen Anne's Lace.

​Again, there’s nothing magical about this. But if you decide to take the challenge, you’ll likely wind up getting absorbed into the adventure, and probably walk away with some random stories and some new discoveries. If so, we’d love you to drop us a comment or email and tell us about your own adventure!