Is there a movie on this drive?

I've always been critical of dvd players in cars. I understood it was a good way to keep kids from getting restless in the car or to entertain adults as well, but I just thought there should be some time where people need to not have their head stuck in some form of visual entertainment. I didn't like the thought of a society that needed to be so constantly entertained that they couldn't even bear to look out the window anymore. That is, until yesterday.

After three hours in the sun watching our last game of the weekend, we were really not looking forward to the 6-hour drive home just two days after making the 6-hour drive to get to Tempe. We had had a couple beers at the game, the sun was setting, and we were tired. These were the key ingredients in the recipe for an afternoon nap, not a road trip. We'd also been in the car so much over the weekend already that music, no matter how upbeat, was just not going to cut it as far as keeping us awake and preserving our sanity. So for the first time, I turned my attention from a desert sunset and opened up a laptop to watch a movie.

As it turned out, it was the perfect antidote to our road weariness, but I was really surprised to find that, for me, it was a new and interesting way to watch a movie. In the movie "Field of Dreams," there's the scene where Ray Kinsella, Terrence Mann, and a young Archie Graham are driving through the night back to the cornfield baseball diamond. It's nothing like the tear-jerking "Hey Dad, wanna have a catch" part, but it's still a part that gets ya everytime, hearing Ray (Kevin Costner) talking about his relationship with his dad. So anyway, here we were, three buddies driving through the night on a two-lane highway, on our way home from a baseball pilgrimmage of our own. We weren't holding hands or anything, but I thought it was still kind of a cool thing, an interactive movie-watching experience.

I don't know that it changed my mind entirely about the whole concept, but it at least opened me up to the possibility that there are exceptions where watching a screen instead of the country you're driving through can a good thing if not the best thing.