Friday, May 12, 2017

A dog, a cat and a bird

Randall has a game his family plays where they count points for certain animals they see while driving.  Four-legged animals are 1 point each to a max of 20 in any group.  Dogs are worth 5 and cats are worth 10.  Birds don't have any points.  Negative 10 for passing a cemetery--apparently this was arbitrarily based on whose side of the vehicle the cemetery was located rather than observation and allocation against a competitor.  First person to reach 100 points wins.

We've made some changes over time to allow for more points based on size and/or rarity (e.g., deer, coyotes, raccoons, chipmunks, turkeys, chickens) we have seen in the U.S., as well as to fix the cemetery rule.  Squirrels still have no points.  However, in Greece, we have different rules.

Here, you can see dogs and cats everywhere and they are usually in the street, so they aren't hard to find.  And with the herds of goats and sheep, usually with one or more dogs, and random assortments of chickens everyday, we can usually get to 100 points before we drive to the next destination.  But the real trick is to see a dog, a cat and a notable bird at the same time.  It's like the trifecta of animal combinations.

Today, I saw a dog walking down the street, a cat lounging on a balcony, and chicken on the side of the house as we were turning right in some random pass-through town.  I wonder if my luck will hold out for tomorrow.

ED: 5/17/17
As we continued driving and then walking through the sites in the Peleponnesse, we decided to make a "Greece specific" game.  Each day you had to find:

a flock of sheep of 20+
a tribe (or flock) of goats 20+
  bonus points for there being an actual human, not a dog, herder
10 dogs
5 cats
chickens
1 horse
and you also had to
hear an owl hooting
hear a rooster crowing

This was much harder, mostly for the horse!

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