The annual family car trip dangles in the memory like the sagging spiral of a Shell No-Pest Strip in a gas station bathroom: It’s always there. It’s a little icky to look at too closely, but it’s always there.
Some Tribune staffers here share their memories of those trips that put the “odd” in “odyssey,” those time-honored rites of summer, those sun-baked journeys typically composed of a frazzled mother, a don’t-make-me-come-back-there father, a pesky brother, a prissy sister, a flatulence-prone pet and way too much luggage.
Many of the staffers, moreover, are now parents themselves — and realize they’ve moved into the front seat. They’re now responsible for how their children will recall family car trips a few decades hence.
Once you’ve read our road-weary reminiscences, we hope you’ll share yours at [email protected].
Huntington, W.Va., to Tucson, Ariz., in a blue and white Volkswagen bus.
My frugal father refused on principle to stop at a motel or restaurant, so we always drove straight through. Hungry? Need a bathroom? Too bad. Tough it out.
Gripping the wheel with a singular ferocity, the whites of his eyes threaded with red, crew cut head angled forward like the prow of a great ship, my father would drive. And drive. And drive. My two sisters, Cathy and Lisa, and I huddled in the back, afraid to complain, exchanging frantic eye-rolls of commiseration and woe.
When exhaustion finally got the better of him, my father would abruptly veer off the highway, kill the engine, fling back his head and fall instantly asleep for several hours, his rest syncopated by massive and spectacular snores. My sisters and my mother and I — all of us, of course, irredeemably awake, our eyes big as pie plates — would sit quietly in the dark as cars shwooshed past with a ghostly sizzle, until finally my father would shake himself awake like a bear emerging from a lake and get us back on the road again.
— Julia Keller
Lisbon, Iowa, to Florida in one week in a 1951 green Chevrolet before the Federal Highway Act was signed by President Eisenhower to create the interstate system.
Time was money in our family. My dad was a self-employed, small-town barber, but the one-week car trip was sacred. Once a year my older sister, Carol, and I would pile into the back seat in Sunday morning’s wee hours and off we’d go to such exotic places as St. Louis, Estes Park in Colorado, Lake-of-the-Woods in Canada, and, in our first big adventure, Jacksonville, Fla. On this trip, I distinctly recall having to pull off the highway in the Smoky Mountains, where Dad had to pour water from a stream to cool off our steam-belching, overheated radiator. We had enough time after reaching the ocean to spend a whole day and a night before turning around for home.
When my kids were younger, I insisted we take a car trip to Florida one spring and took the interstates. I also insisted on leaving the super-highways in Georgia, where we took a side trip to Plains and bumped into former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn in a bookstore in Americus. We got a chance to chat with them for 10 minutes, they graciously signed a book, and we continued on our way to Florida. Only in America! I never fail to remind my kids that the best things often happen when you get off the beaten path.
— Mike Conklin
Two weeks. Two parents. Three kids. No air conditioning. Destination: The American West.
Our family’s August 1959 car trip from St. Louis to Montana rolls right out of every novel, film or TV show you’ve ever seen about the Eisenhower years. Yes, we really looked like that, did those things, shared those golden family moments. I was almost 6, my brothers were 7 and 2. Roll down the windows, head for the interstate and listen to some vintage dialogue:
“Bobby threw my shoe out the window.”
“Stop that fighting! Stop it! Don’t make me stop this car and come back there!”
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“What do you mean you both bought the same comic book? Why couldn’t you two buy different ones and share?”
“Mom, does he have to sing?”
“This motel has a swimming pool! We don’t have to take baths!”
In the restaurant: “Where’s your brother (Clint the toddler)? … He’s over there in the corner. He’s taking his pants off! He’s … eeewww! … “
“I want you kids to go with your mother out to the car, right now. Go!”
“Kids, look, the Rocky Mountains!”
“What’s the matter with those kids? They won’t even look up. I can’t believe it. Did I drive all the way out here so they could read comic books?”
“Look, kids, the bears come right up to the cars. Don’t touch the windows, just look.”
“Doggie!”
“No, those are bears. Say `bears.'”
“Doggie!”
In the Yellowstone National Park souvenir shop:”Where’s your brother?”
From the back seat, 50 miles later: “Dad! Clint stole a stuffed animal! He stole it, Dad! Back at Yellowstone! Are the police coming after us? Should we make him get down and hide until we get away?”
“Doggie!”
— Lilah Lohr
Seattle to Vancouver in a black Honda Accord:
Having a grandmother living in Vancouver meant an automatic, monthly two-hour car ride up Interstate 5. Sitting in the back seat with nothing to do, my Walkman became a godsend. But once we left that 70-mile radius outside Seattle, my Mariners’ baseball broadcast on AM radio turned into Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. I was clamoring and complaining by Hour One, and my parents were desperate to shut me up.
They found their solution in the town of Burlington, Wash., about 75 miles north of Seattle. Here was a town with a claim to fame of Food-Gas-Lodging at the next exit, with a Super 8, Shell Station and Wendy’s near the off-ramp.
But it also had a factory outlet, a wondrous strip mall of low-cost, bottom-of-the-heap toys, books and fashion that became my destination every fourth weekend of the month.
One time, I bought Domino Rally at K-B Toys Outlet, a set of plastic domino tiles that you’d spend an hour assembling and 30 seconds watching tumble. My parents would always find the latest, most innovative gadget to peel garlic or slice a hard-boiled egg.
But my favorite outlet merchandise was the 1992 Guinness Book of Records — which I purchased in 1994. For $2.99. I read the rest of the way, in silence.
— Kevin Pang
Billings to Peerless (Montana) in a Ford mini-station wagon:
Back then, I had no idea who the Joad family was.
Now, the image of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” family traveling in their possession-packed jalopy perfectly conjures up the trips I took with my family and grandparents in the 1980s.
Each summer, six of us piled into our grandparents’ white Ford mini-station wagon for a seven-hour drive from Billings to my aunt’s ranch in Peerless, near the Canadian border. My mom called the area “dirt-cloddin’ country” — remote, desolate, beautiful. However, judging from the way our grandparents packed, you’d have thought we were headed for the moon. We brought lawn chairs, two coolers, blankets, magazines, luggage, Christmas presents for December (why waste postage?), toys, tool boxes, medical kits — even toilet paper for roadside emergencies.
The little car sagged under the weight. Our supplies were stacked from floor to ceiling, thus blocking the entire back window and the rearview mirror. When we stopped suddenly, those of us in the back seat would get buried under a pile of blankets, National Enquirer magazines and Cheez-It boxes.
Today, I only travel with what I can fit in the trunk.
— Robert K. Elder
Chicago to Montana in a Taurus wagon:
Our 19-year-old son recalls the trip west we made when he was 5 as, simply, “The Drive.”
It was a forced march with breaks for museums.
The boys, the aforementioned Evan and his stepbrother, Casey — enough older that there was minimal fighting — played with a Game Boy, hewed beef jerky and slept as the Ford Taurus wagon ate interstate across western Illinois, all of Iowa, endless Nebraska.
During Nebraska, we came upon Scout’s Rest, a surprisingly feminine-looking Victorian house Buffalo Bill Cody had lived in during the heyday of his Wild West Show. On a driving vacation, you take what the interstate gives. The boys eagerly agreed to stop — anything to get out of the car — and pretended to care about the 1890s tchotchkes and the shaky old black-and-white footage of people doing cowboy and Indian stuff. On to Colorado — a bed (down quilts) and breakfast (wonderful lemon bread) in Colorado Springs, Wyoming’s gorgeous rocks and rivers and no people for hours, a visit to a dinosaur exhibit and Casey’s sister, Amy, at Montana State University, where she was majoring in skiing). And then we had had it.
We had lost a lot of our allotted time on mountain roads, where the Mrs., a born-and-raised Chicago flatlander, hadn’t realized that highway maps failed to account for vast changes in elevation and more switchbacks than healthy intestines.
We decided to beat it home without stopping. Somewhere in the middle of the night in the middle of Minnesota (we all had agreed that passing Mt. Rushmore at some distance was good enough) when I was avoiding oncoming cars that weren’t there, we broke for two hours in a motel for naps. Next stop, Chicago.
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Evan is in college now, Casey and Amy have kids of their own. The wagon was taken to a dealer to be traded in, but it exploded in smoke (luckily, not in flames) in the parking lot.
— Charles Leroux
The most common road trips I took as a teenager in New Jersey were to Atlantic City and back, because that was where the casinos were, and my father, who was an accomplished (and yes, compulsive) gambler, used to sit at the blackjack table with big shots and celebrities.
We would load up the family’s black Cadillac (come on: did you think an Italian-American from South Philadelphia drove a Subaru?). Dad controlled the music, and it was Perry Como, Dean Martin and Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra all the way down U.S. Highway 30, and all the way back, eight-track tapes stacked on the front seat and littering the floor below the dash. My brother, Tony, and I would exact our revenge by singing parody lyrics out loud, turning Como’s “My One and Only Heart” into “My One and Only Fart” (punctuated, of course, by raspberry noises for full effect).
It’s hard for me to believe now that those trips to the Jersey Shore were so boring for my brother and me. We stayed in luxury suites provided by the casinos — one was so big that it had a full-size piano in it, reportedly put there at some superstar’s request. But on the whole, I’d have rather been back home rehearsing Devo’s “Whip It” with my garage band. And when I began to see more clearly just how much money my dad had to put in action to keep us staying there, I began to boycott the trips.
I only wish I hadn’t boycotted Perry Como so much. My mom went into a nursing home a few months ago, and if I could take one thing back, I’d request that Dad play “Dream Along With Me” — her favorite song — for her. Then I would have him turn up the volume until she became lost in the reverie.
— Louis R. Carlozo
Your turn
Our stories are one thing. But we’re sure yours are better. So please write and tell us your tales and we will print them.
Send to Car Trips, Tempo, baiduhai, Chicago, IL 60611. Or e-mail to [email protected]. Or go to chicagotribune.com/cartrip. Please include your full name, your hometown and your phone number in case we have questions.
A poll
DVD players or VCRs to amuse the children on long road trips: Are they a blessing — or are they bad, defeating the whole purpose of the family experience? Vote at chicagotribune.com/cartrip