A Road Tripping Good Time

The family road trip sparked my love of travel.

Nearly every summer, we would pack into our car to head to places like Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone and Colorado.

This was the pre-Internet era, and in preparation for such trips I would mail postcards found in my Mom’s magazines to get travel guides.

We’d overpack, pack a cooler with pop and snacks and just get in the car and go.  Oftentimes, we would have no reservations and no real itinerary. Usually, my parents would yell to us kids to pack our bags that we were leaving on vacation with just a few hours notice. Being farmers, to take a summer vacation, you had to have just enough rain to be able to turn off the irrigation pivots for a week so you could get away.

One year we went with some of my parents’ friends and their son to the Black Hills. I sat in the seat in the middle in the front, and he in the middle seat in the back of our diesel Pontiac Bonneville. No seatbelts, of course. Those were the days!

Some dry years when we had to irrigate more, it was just a trip to Kansas City or one year to the Bridges of Madison County, Living History Farms and Adventureland in Iowa.

But some years, if we’d get a few inches of rain in early to mid-August. It would be Yellowstone, Durango or a week in Rocky Mountain National Park. My Dad took his mountain driving seriously. We didn’t just take Trail Ridge Road through RMNP, but the gravel Old Fall River Road. He always had to try and find an “off road” that might just give us more spectacular views of the mountains.

I often dreamed of flying to Disneyland in California or Walt Disney World in Florida. But we never ventured where the car, or later, the minivan, couldn’t take us in a day or two.

Other favorites were Pike’s Peak, Seven Falls and the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs and the Royal Gorge near Canon City.

And, if we happened upon a Holiday Inn with a Holidome at a reasonable price — look out! I was in HEAVEN. We also stayed at plenty of roadside motels with outdoor pools placed right in the middle of the parking lot. If the pool had a slide — event better!

A book I recently read while Tim and I were on our own road trip this summer,  got me thinking about all these things. “Don’t Make Me Pull Over! An Informal History of the Family Road Trip” by Richard Ratay really was a trip down memory lane. It also got me thinking about a lot of things that now we take for granted.

For example, how did we ever find anything? It is so easy to just type in an address now and have Siri tell you where to go. On our trip this summer, we drove from Nebraska and toured New England. I’ll give you more details about crossing these six states off our list and moving our state count up to 49 (!!), in my next blog. But one funny story during the first part of our trip, after leaving Chicago, we drove to Toronto for the night. However, after entering Canada, we realized we didn’t add international data to our phone plan. We weren’t even going to be in Canada for more than 24 hours.  We should be fine, right?!? After a brief panic, we stopped at an Enroute that we saw had free Wi-Fi. We couldn’t get either of our phones to connect. So we bought some Canadian essentials — Coffee Crisps, Ketchup Lays and — a paper map!

We were able to find our downtown Toronto hotel just fine the old way — using a paper map. That is how we used to do things, right?! I loved being the map navigator on our family trips. I may even go out and buy a new atlas after this trip. For “just in case” on our next road trip. I remember my parents’ fancy atlas that we took along on every trip. It had a beautiful soft leather case with my dad’s name on it.  Those really were the days!

Do you still take road trips? Or are you more of a jet-setter? I can’t wait to hear about it. And, I can’t wait to tell you more about our New England adventure in my next blog. In the meantime, here are a few pictures to tide you over.

World’s Tallest Filing Cabinet in Burlington, VT.

A stop at the Ben and Jerry’s factory!

Acadia National Park in Maine

Boston Harbor

Newport, R.I.