A road trip is the iconic American vacation — with a richer and more complicated history than it may seem. What the American road trip reveals about who we are.

Guest

Allen Pietrobon, historian and professor of global affairs at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Allyson Hobbs, professor of U.S. history and the director of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.

Also Featured

Aatish Taseer, author and journalist. Author of “A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile” and the forthcoming, “The Rootless Elysium: America at 250, A Journey.”

Shing Yin Khor, graphic novelist and filmmaker. Author of “The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

AMORY SIVERTSON: Deedee Herald lives near Grand Junction, Colorado. In 1970, she turned 16, and her grandparents took her on her first road trip.

DEEDEE HERALD: I was my grandparents’ oldest grandchild, and my grandma never drove. My grandpa loved to drive, and he was the one who taught me to drive. For my 16th summer road trip with them, which they invented, we took this amazing trip where we went to New Mexico, visited all of these sites that I had not known were really historic for us.

A village called, it’s a ghost village called Boquillas, where three times great-grandparents are buried.

SIVERTSON: Deedee never forgot that trip.

HERALD: That road trip just had such a huge impact on my life. So we decided, my husband and I decided that we would always want to take our grandkids, let them have that experience.

And we did road trips with our kids, but we were really looking forward to the grandkids. And so we’ve been able to take them on road trips. They get to pick where they wanna go.

SIVERTSON: Deedee and her husband have road tripped with grandkids around Washington, D.C., to the Pacific Northwest, and just last week they got back from a Southwest road trip with their granddaughter, Hazel.

Hazel has never lived in Colorado. She doesn’t have any of the feelings for geography that are so important to us. She had never heard of Mesa Verde. She had, did not even know that there was ever such a thing as narrow gauge railroads. She really wanted to see if she could add three more states to her tally of states she had ever been in.

So we went down to Four Corners, which is a monument to really nothing, but it’s just where the four states meet. And it’s a kitschy, strange, weird thing.

SIVERTSON: Deedee says these road trips are about connection, connecting with her grandkids and connecting them to the history and landscapes she considers home.

The thing is that we’ve never made much money. We don’t do big, expensive vacations with fancy hotels or fancy restaurants, but we can get in the car and go and have all these adventures and see wonderful things.

SIVERTSON: That was Deedee Herald, who lives near Grand Junction, Colorado. So the American road trip, it’s a rite of passage some would say, a way to connect with family, a way to see the country, to explore.

But is the road trip unique to America? And if so, why? To answer that, you’ve gotta get in, come along for the ride, if you will, as we take a trip through the rich but also complicated history of the great American road trip. Joining me now is Allen Pietrobon. He’s a historian and professor of global affairs at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C.

He’s taught a course on the history of the great American road trip, and he joins us now from Paw Paw, West Virginia. Allen, welcome to On Point.

ALLEN PIETROBON: Thank you for having me. I am delighted to be here today.

SIVERTSON: So I’m curious to hear your reaction to Deedee’s story there and the idea of paying forward the road trip experience to future generations.

PIETROBON: I loved that story. I was smiling the entire time I was listening to it there because I think that is what’s so cherished about the American road trip, that you can share it with family members, whether it be grandparents and grandchildren or parents and kids. It is this whole family experience that, as Deedee mentioned, is accessible.

Most American families own a car that you can just hop in and go for comparatively little money to see the country.

Most American families own a car that you can just hop in and go for comparatively little money to see the country. Allen PIETROBON

SIVERTSON: So most of your teaching is about international affairs these days, but this course you taught on the American road trip came out of your love of travel. So what’s your own American road trip history?

PIETROBON: Yeah, it came out of my love of travel and partly most of my day-to-day job is dealing with nuclear weapons policy, so I needed a break from that to more —

SIVERTSON:  You don’t say.

PIETROBON: More lighter, yeah not exactly an uplifting topic. But if we go back, if I were to trace my own connection to this story the little secret is I’m not American.

I am now. I’m sharing that with all of the listeners out there. But I grew up in Canada, and there was always this allure of the American road trip for me. And what that came to a culmination when I graduated from college, which I did in Canada. I took a three-month-long road trip on a motorcycle around just circumnavigating the United States.

I wanted to see the sights I had read so much about, and I wanted to partly, as a young man coming of age, discover something about myself, which is so prominent in a lot of these American road trip stories.

SIVERTSON: And this allure of the great American road trip seems to hint at the fact that maybe there’s not exactly a great Canadian road trip.

How is it different driving through Canada versus America?

PIETROBON: This is something I’ve looked into because I give a lot of public talks on this topic. It’s one of my most popular public talks. It connects with almost everyone. But often the question is do other countries have a road trip culture?

So I’ve looked into other similar countries that have a similar car culture, similar geography. But the difference is in Canada, yes, road tripping is a thing that people do, but just because of the geography of Canada, about 90% of the population lives within 200 miles of the U.S. border. And if you look at a map, there’s essentially only one highway that transits the country the Trans-Canada Highway.

And there are some highways going north from there. But if you’re Canadian the real the great Canadian road trip is to drive the Trans-Canada Highway from coast to coast, which I also did. But it’s different. You get one, basically one route. A lot of it, especially once you get out of the cities, is through wilderness, which is beautiful in its own way, but it’s very different than the multitude of highways you can take to get different cultural experiences across the U.S.

SIVERTSON: And there’s all sorts of writing about the great American road trip from literature. John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “Every American hungers to move.” So why is that? Do we actually travel more and move around more, and why?

PIETROBON: We do. And we can trace this if you want to go way back in history to the 14, 15, 1600s that America is populated by these white settlers who undertook the treacherous, dangerous journey of leaving Europe and coming to the New World.

And ever since they arrived, they continued pushing west from there. And it is, if you tie it all the way back there, the statistics are shocking, that even in the modern day, Americans move more than really any other people on earth. If you look at the numbers, the average American will move their homes 11 times in their lifetime.

And ever since they arrived, they continued pushing west. Allen PIETROBON

And the next people who move the most are Europeans. They will move just four times on average. So whether we move for love or for work or for school, we move around for travel, that mobility in a way is uniquely American that doesn’t, no other country really matches that.

SIVERTSON: So it sounds like the spirit of the road trip maybe predates automobiles in general.

But let’s talk about when cars come into the picture here. When did cars start becoming long distance affordable machines?

PIETROBON: It’s actually quite recent, more recent than I think a lot of people think about. It’s not really until after World War II although, car culture begins, of course, with the 1908 introduction of the Model T Ford.

But those early automobiles are expensive, are seen as a rich man’s toy, and more importantly, are unreliable and difficult and require constant maintenance. And so the average American, when they thought long distance travel, they took the train. If you needed to leave the city, you took the train somewhere, starting after the Civil War with the Transcontinental Railroad.

But after World War II, when we get the interstate highways that make travel convenient, fun even, certainly much more reliable, that American families start traveling a lot more by automobile. Instead of, we can talk about previous modes of travel too. But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, and that’s why I think when we think about the great American road trip, it’s often this iconic image of the 1950s and ’60s when cars are big and luxurious, when gas is 30 cents a gallon.

You can throw the kids in the seven-seat station wagon with the rear-facing seat and no seat belts and head out on the open road in this search of freedom.

SIVERTSON: Glorious. I want to go before World War II for a minute here. You mentioned the ’50s, which makes me think of Eisenhower, and Eisenhower actually has a role in the road trip, you could say, in the sense that he takes this cross-country road trip in 1919 when he’s just 29 years old.

What happened?

PIETROBON: Oh, this is a great story, and one of the sort of turning points of the American road trip story. So 1919, it’s right at the end of World War I when the U.S. government, U.S. military specifically, recognizes that these new-fangled devices of automobiles, which again, the Model T is only about 10 years old, that trucks are starting to be introduced to wartime service, that these vehicles are going to be a game changer.

So in 1919, they give the U.S. military a new mission. They are going to drive 100 vehicles from essentially the front door of the White House all the way across the country to San Francisco, and they put this young man, Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of this expedition. And to make a long story short, the trip takes them 61 days to complete, and it does not go well.

In 1919, there were almost no improved roads. They’re driving literally across the country on horse trails and wagon trails. The convoy’s average speed is six miles an hour, right? It’s treacherous. I think 20 or so men on the expedition get injured along the way, and one of the veterans describes, and again, keep in mind, this is a World War I veteran who fought in the trenches of France, and he describes the travel conditions across the U.S. as being like battle operations in France. So Eisenhower has this experience of the treacherous travel conditions, and then when he becomes president in the 1950s, he inaugurates the interstate system.

Part II

SIVERTSON: So take On Point listener Susan from Brookline, Massachusetts. In 2023, she took her first road trip. She was 59 years old, and her youngest child had just gone off to college. She traveled for 100 days and 14,000 miles in her 1970 Porsche.

SUSAN: I did it because I had never traveled for any significant amount of time just myself.

My husband, whom I bought the car with, died many years ago of brain cancer, and it was really his car. And I did it as a kind of rite of passage and also to understand and think for some time, just for me, about what I wanted to do with my life and where I wanted to go.

SIVERTSON: And then there’s Laura from Kennewick, Washington, who told us about her road trip last summer from Washington, D.C. back to Washington State.

LAURA: We saw so much. It was incredible. We’re still processing. We just saw the variety and the beauty of the countryside. We’re suckers for roadside attractions, for small museums. We saw the world’s biggest belt buckle. It was fantastic, and I just loved it, and it’s going to be core memories for all of us for the rest of our lives.

SIVERTSON: There’s also just the romance of the road trip and how it’s portrayed in literature. Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1957 novel, On the Road, quote, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” And John Steinbeck wrote in his 1962 travelogue, Travels with Charley, quote, “A journey is a person in itself. No two are alike, and all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find, after years of struggle, that we do not take a trip. A trip takes us.”

So I’ve been talking with Allen Pietrobon. He’s a historian and professor at Trinity Washington University, where he teaches a course on the American road trip.

And Allen, some people set out on road trips in search of something, that they’re trying to discover some part of themself or to push themself. But what is it about the road trip that gives it this mythical, transformative reputation? Is it something about the act of driving, the slower pace of driving?

What is it?

PIETROBON: This is a very common theme in a lot of the road trip literature, but we’ve also been hearing it from the listeners who have given their takes on this, that you set out on the road either in search of yourself to try to find yourself as, that phrase a rite of passage has come up a few times now, or you set out on the road in search of, and I’m gonna put it in air quotes here, “America, the real America.”

Even Jack Kerouac wrote that he was setting off to find the post-Whitman America, meaning after the Civil War, and he’s taking this trip in 1948, that we travel to connect with an earlier, maybe simpler time, discover the country in a place different than where you live. Because this is a vast country with different cultures regionally and different geographies of course.

And the beauty of America, what makes the road trip I think truly unique in this country, is we have every geography, every climate. You can go from arctic snow in Alaska to deserts in Arizona, and there are few, if any, other countries that have that sort of variety and diversity in the natural beauty of this country without needing a passport, without needing an expensive flight to get somewhere else.

SIVERTSON: That’s so true. I was studying abroad when I was 18 years old I think, and I feel like I saw more of Europe before I saw the rest of America, and I was so struck when I finally did drive across America at just how much there was to see. So I want to go back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. What happens in the wake of that 1919 sort of disastrous long 61-day trip across the country that he takes?

In 1926, we see the Federal Highway Act. What did this do?

PIETROBON: Yeah, so in the earlier days, I’m generalizing here, but the federal government said, “Not our business to build roads. If you want a road in your community, pass the hat, take up a collection, hire a company, build a road.” But by the 1920s when cars are becoming more prominent, they’re still not in the majority yet, the federal government starts funding matching funds for state road building.

And in 1926, that partly is what leads to the iconic Route 66 which is gonna take this patchwork of local roads and stitch them together in one sort of transcontinental highway that opens in the mid-1920s. And it has now become Route 66, the most iconic road in America. And what I find most interesting, it’s not just every American knows about this.

People overseas, when I travel to other countries, they are fascinated by Route 66. I met someone in Russia a number of years ago who knew precisely two English words that he was so excited to say in English, that he knew the word California and he knew the word Route 66.

SIVERTSON: So how do we get from Route 66 to, say, this sort of golden age, if there is one, of road trips in the 1960s?

Because in the middle there you have World War II, and you have a changing relationship between Americans and their cars. Can you talk about that?

PIETROBON: Yeah. Route 66 becomes really important during the 1930s, where it’s used often as this road for people to flee the Dust Bowl, to move to another place.

It’s not really used all that much for leisure travel in the ’20s and ’30s, and in the ’40s, what changes is car production essentially stops during World War II. There is one year, I can’t remember if it’s ’42 or ’43, when just under 400 new cars are produced in all of America because these automakers switch over to building tanks and aircraft and all of that.

And the second formative moment is when Dwight Eisenhower, who experienced that horrible trip, goes off, fights in World War II. He doesn’t fight, he leads in World War II and experiences the autobahn. The Germans had beat us by 20 years to building a high-speed, closed-access highway system. And Eisenhower realizes two things.

One, this is great for travel. Two, it’s also great for military purposes. We can move troops rapidly to where they need to be in the event of an attack. They’re thinking about a Soviet nuclear attack by now after World War II. And the third thing that changes after World War II is car ownership nearly doubles in the 10 years that follow the war, and our highway system is in crisis.

We have not built a highway system yet. It is still, aside from Route 66 and the Lincoln Highway, mainly a patchwork of local roads. And so Eisenhower inaugurates the federal interstate system that’s gonna connect up every part of the country with, I think it’s 41,000 miles of well-paved, high-speed highways.

Wow. Okay. I wanna bring another voice into this conversation, Allen. We have Allyson Hobbs, who’s a professor of U.S. history and the director of African and African American studies at Stanford University. She’s also taught a course on the history of the American road trip, and she’s currently working on a book about African American travel in 20th century America.

Allyson Hobbs, welcome to On Point.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really a delight to join this conversation.

SIVERTSON: It’s a delight to have you, and I’m curious about your own road trip history. What were your earliest road trips?

HOBBS: I really appreciate the question, and I think I share a lot of the experiences that some of your callers have described, where my family would travel to Chicago from New Jersey to visit family members.

We also would take road trips to New Orleans to visit family members at the holidays. And we every year went to Hilton Head, South Carolina for a family vacation, and that was a two-day road trip. And my dad got very excited about creating playlists, and so music was certainly a big part of our road trip, and the road trip was almost as important as the vacation.

SIVERTSON: And you’ve said that how you thought about road trips changed as you got older.

HOBBS: Exactly. I think when I was younger, I didn’t have the awareness of the danger of road trips for Black families, and I think my parents did a great job of kind of shielding me from thinking about that. And also, I think we were very lucky that we had very pleasant drives to Chicago and New Orleans and to Hilton Head.

And even though we were driving in the South, and even though this, we began our trips in the ’70s, while there was still this kind of like patchwork of local roads that brought us into Hilton Head that we found ourselves still treated very well and safe.

So I think I was very lucky in that regard.

SIVERTSON: So about the dangers that you’re talking about associated with the road trip for Black families in particular road tripping south to visit family, can you talk about this history and the risks that came with road trips to the South?

HOBBS: Yes. I think it’s really interesting to think about the road trip from the perspective of Black travelers, because on the one hand, there was the same amount of excitement and adventure and kind of joy of getting out on the road.

And in many ways, it was even maybe more profound, in the sense that some Black families saw their cars as almost these, like, sanctuaries on wheels in a way, because as Black families faced housing discrimination and redlining practices and other forms of discrimination, the car kind of offered this sort of private little capsule, where Black families could feel a sense of safety and were not having to travel in the Jim Crow car on a train or at the back of the bus but rather had this kind of autonomy in the car.

But the other problem though, or what made these trips complex for Black families as well was that there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unpredictability when it came to what they might face on the road, whether that meant scrutiny, surveillance, heightened policing, whether that meant not being able to eat at a restaurant, not being able to stop at a restaurant and eat, or maybe it meant that a gas station might refuse to sell gas to a Black family, or maybe they would agree to sell gas, but then they might not allow the family to use the bathroom.

They might not allow the family to buy a Coca-Cola. And that could be, of course, very humiliating particularly for Black parents if this was occurring in front of their children.

SIVERTSON: So Allyson Hobbs, you’ve also taken a road trip that followed the Green Book.

This came out in 1936. A postal worker, Victor Hugo Green, creates this guide to places and services, road stops along the way that were relatively friendly to African Americans. What was that trip like?

HOBBS: That trip was really incredible for me for many reasons. One, just given that I love road trips and love traveling and then also seeing the history and seeing the ways that the Green Book was so innovative and creative in sort of Victor Green’s idea of what can we do to make road trips more possible and more enjoyable and less unpredictable for Black families?

And so he, as you said, he gathered together, he used his contacts within the postal service and gathered together listings of friendly restaurants places to stay even services like barber shops and beauty parlors were listed in the Green Book. And it’s also a really fascinating history of Black businesses.

So the Lorraine Motel is listed in the Green Book, and there’s other just famous Black-owned businesses that are also listed there. So it was quite interesting to travel through the South and to see what locations and what businesses are still in existence, which ones have turned into really historic places and which ones are altogether gone, which ones have entirely disappeared.

SIVERTSON: And there’s a reason for that. Some of these places and some of these entire neighborhoods maybe where these places were once located are no longer there. Why is that?

HOBBS: In some cases, it’s because there are highways that run through those neighborhoods. Some of those places might have been what were called tourist homes, which were Black families who were willing to open up their homes to have Black travelers stay with them, a kind of Airbnb before Airbnbs.

And in many of these cases, there were highways that were built that really devastated Black neighborhoods because they were built right through Black communities. And in some cases, those locations are gone because of the building of highways.

Part III

SIVERTSON: When researching for this show, we came across an article in The New York Times from last year titled “What a New American Citizen Learned on Route 66.” It was written by Aatish Taseer.

Aatish was born in England, raised in India, and educated in the U.S. In 2019, he was stripped of his Indian citizenship after writing an article for Time magazine that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He now lives in New York. And in the spring of 2024, Aatish, a new American citizen, drove the entire length of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in a rented Dodge Charger.

AATISH TASEER: I’ve traveled very widely, and I have to say that it remains in my one, two, top three moments of trips that I feel like I will never forget.

SIVERTSON: Before his road trip, Aatish hadn’t ventured much beyond New York. He says he felt unsettled about the interior United States, unsure what he’d find or feel.

TASEER: And there was a moment in Amarillo especially, where the beauty of the interior West hadn’t opened up yet, but there was just immensity. And I think I described it in the piece as coming out of a parish church into a cathedral, and that physical space, like I’m in England right now, and England is so tight, so compact, you feel like you almost see it coast to coast, and in America that, I think that you can’t really grasp what it’s like, the audacity of the American experiment, until you actually see the land go by in those ways. And so it affected me on just a kind of aesthetic, physical level.

SIVERTSON: The audacity of the American experiment, the settler spirit, the belief that you can be or do anything in this country.

Aatish says he got all these kicks on Route 66. He also sensed a sort of freedom from the past.

TASEER: Everywhere else that I’ve lived, people know that firstly they stew over history. They feel it in their bones. They know that the future cannot exist without them somehow resolving these nodal points of tension in the past.

And in America, both as a lived experience, but also, I think as a sort of ideology, there is this feeling of what you could be if you were not bogged down by the past.

SIVERTSON: That was Aatish Taseer. He’s writer at large for T, The New York Times Style magazine. His piece last year was titled What a New American Citizen Learned on Route 66, and he has a book coming out this fall, a longer meditation on this trip down Route 66 called The Rootless Elysium: America at 250, A Journey.

We also reached out to graphic novelist and filmmaker Shing Yin Khor. In 1999, at the age of 16, they immigrated to the United States from Malaysia. In 2015, Shing wanted to better understand America and set out to drive Route 66. They wrote about it in their 2016 book, The American Dream: A Journey on Route 66, and we asked if they experienced a sense of freedom on the trip.

SHING YIN KHOR: I don’t think of road trips as freedom. Maybe whiteness and masculinity affords the concept of a road trip as liberating. But for me, as a queer immigrant of color, it’s about knowledge and curiosity. Hard things compel me. Just because it’s not, an easy, liberating thing doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do it.

And if anything, like as a marginalized person, road tripping for me is the act of taking up space. And driving all of Route 66 is the act of saying that this country is mine too, and that I also belong here.

SIVERTSON: Allyson Hobbs, what did you hear there in either Shing Yin Khor’s comment or Aatish’s story about taking up space in this immensity of America?

HOBBS: I think that captures the kind of beauty of the road trip so well because it really does mean something very different for each traveler that decides to take a road trip, and I think that maybe that’s part of what makes the road trip such a part of American kind of iconography and mythology, and also such a part of the process of self-discovery and knowledge the ways that anyone can come to it and take something from it, can learn about themselves, can learn about the country, can learn about the geography and the landscape.

I love the caller who mentioned seeing the biggest belt buckle. All of these just amazing things that we get to explore. And I think that certainly Victor Green, when he created the Green Guide, that’s what he had in mind that perhaps he wanted Black travelers to be able to experience all of these sort of curiosities and these idiosyncrasies of America just as anyone else could.

SIVERTSON: Yeah. Allen Pietrobon, I talked about this cross-country road trip that I took when I was about 20 years old, and I’d say my biggest takeaway was just disbelief that all of these places, all of this terrain, all of these people with all of their accents and different ways of life and political beliefs all belong to the same country.

And that, to me, feels really the importance of the road trip. You come back with this transformed sense of what America is and what it means to belong to this country. But you also come back with some great roadside attractions like a motel called It’ll Do and a restaurant called Nuttin’ Fancy.

And it makes me think of how the road trip has changed and is changing. So can you speak to that? I feel like my inner old lady is gonna come out a little bit in thinking about how it’s changed. But what are some ways that you feel like the road trip is starting to change?

PIETROBON: I was just thinking, my inner old man too of like my earliest road trips were done with paper maps still.

SIVERTSON: The atlas. The atlas on the map, on the lap of the passenger.

PIETROBON: Yeah, which was especially difficult, I did a lot of trips on a motorcycle where you had to constantly stop to unfold the map more, ’cause it wouldn’t fit on anyone’s lap.

But that was half of the challenge of the journey, plotting your route. But what I think about, often we have this nostalgia over the American road trip, and that’s partly we’ve spoken a lot about Route 66, but in a way Route 66 is frozen in amber. It got bypassed by the interstates after the 1960s.

And so part of the reason it’s so amazing, so kitschy almost with the belt buckle and the giant statues, is in the era before smartphones, before you could really know what was ahead and look up reviews of the restaurant or hotel, businesses had to do these ridiculous things to catch your attention, like putting out the world’s largest ball of string or the largest belt buckle.

Naming their restaurants or hotels in names that catch your attention. And that’s not really necessary as much anymore. You mainly look up online where you’re gonna go along the route. There’s less, in my mind it’s changing, there’s less organic discovery in that way.

There’s fewer detours. So I think it’s changing.

SIVERTSON: Right, and when you do look up, Motel 6 and Denny’s, and you don’t see as many It’ll Do’s and Nuttin’ Fancy’s, perhaps.

PIETROBON: The tragedy I see is exactly that the increasing uniformity of American life. It’s becoming less and less different as you travel across the country.

You can get a McDonald’s, it’s gonna taste the same anywhere. But the flip side of that is in 1948 when the McDonald’s brothers created their first car-oriented drive-in restaurant, that’s what people wanted. They wanted that ability to just know what you’re gonna get and not have to stop in at the It’ll Do and maybe it’s terrible, maybe it won’t do.

Have a bad experience. The McDonald’s was this hailing of technology that allowed for people to know to get rid of the uncertainty in travel, and I think there’s something lost in that.

SIVERTSON: The atlas comment makes me think about technology and how much that is changing the way that we travel.

Now most of us outsource the navigation itself to GPS apps in our phones. Allyson, do you think that’s potentially changing our relationship to the trip itself now that we are detaching ourselves from the actual way finding?

HOBBS: I think absolutely. I think one of the things that was so fun about the atlas or was so fun about having to do it yourself was that you got to choose which landmarks and which pieces of Americana you really wanted to see.

And now I think that there’s on like Google Maps you can click on, find local attractions or, but again, it’s doing that for you. But at the same time, maybe that allows us to almost see more. Maybe because it’s so accessible and because technology is fairly accessible. Maybe it then makes it so that we can really see even more or learn about places that haven’t been as historically preserved or as well known.

Maybe there’s a local museum that still does exist that we can find with technology. When I taught the class, my students found this tiny museum on Bigfoot. And we made a special sort of detour to see the Museum of Bigfoot. And unfortunately it actually wasn’t open when we went to see it. And I think my students were shocked that, this, how could this museum not be open on a Saturday? And they had done the research to find it. But I think that was a great experience in and of itself that they found this special little place and we had to navigate our way there.

And I think that’s all part of kind of the magic of the road trip.

SIVERTSON: Allen, thinking back to Deedee Herald whom we heard from at the top of the show, her grandparents took her on a road trip. Now she takes her grandkids on road trips who may someday take their grandkids on road trips of their own.

What do you think the sort of like generation or two in the future, what does the road trip look like then?

PIETROBON: I think it looks a lot different. One of the things I mentioned frozen in amber. I think one of the reasons we have this iconic period from, let’s say, 1950 to 1980 maybe of road tripping in cars is partly because in that moment, air travel before the 1980s is wildly expensive.

And the railroad networks have basically fallen apart and gone bankrupt by the late 1960s. So if you want to travel and you don’t wanna take a Greyhound bus, cars for a middle class family are really the only way to do it. Whereas now, flights are so cheap comparatively and a lot of young people of certain means are doing the backpacking trip across Europe because it’s affordable to do.

So that’s one thing I think that has changed things already. It’s just flights are more accessible. But as we move forward into the future, I’m torn about automated cars maybe 20 years from now, that we talked about using the GPS to do the navigating. Maybe we won’t drive at all.

And on one hand, that’s really disappointing because the act of the journey is 90% of the experience, and yet on the other hand, I do look forward to the day where on a Friday night I can click a button on my phone and the car pulls up. I can relax in the backseat reading a book while it whisks me out to the ocean or to the mountains for the weekend.

SIVERTSON: Oh, man, don’t even get me started on the self-driving cars. Just on the way in this morning, Allen, I saw someone driving a Cybertruck, not even driving because they were using both of their hands to send a text message while their car was driving them, and I had this thought like, “Oh, no, what would that do to the road trip?”

Maybe you could, instead of texting, you could spend more time looking out the window or, a lot of my road trips were, we were just singing song. We were making up games. We there was a lot of creative boredom now that I worry about being lost as we take steps forward.

But again, inner old lady here. … I’m curious for both of you, do either of you have a road trip planned in the near future, and where are you going?

PIETROBON: I will be heading for, in August, myself and my family first up to Canada and then out through Quebec out to the East Coast of the U.S. to Maine, and then back down the coast through New York to Washington, D.C., where I’m based out of.

So that’s something I’m looking forward to. But if I can pick up one point, you had used that great phrase of, was it creative boredom? Or I often refer to it as a distracted drift. I think the reason so many people are drawn to road trips is just that if you’re a passenger just looking out the window, letting your mind go blank, but also be active.

And I found I did plenty of road tripping by car in my younger years, but I also did a lot by motorcycle with my father on two separate motorcycles. And it was always amazing at the end of the day to stop after a long day’s ride, go to a restaurant, and then compare notes on what we had seen and what I had missed and he had seen, and the differences between our experiences that were on the same route.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.