Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Rock

by Mike Barish on

Yesterday, Annie posted a top ten list about why road trips suck. I was shocked and appalled, to say the least. After reading her piece and discussing it with folks on Twitter, I deduced that Annie didn’t really hate road trips. She hated long car rides. There’s a distinction and it’s an important one. Road trips make the journey the adventure. The act of being in the car, seeing the sights and not having to rush becomes your trip. The destination is secondary. Long car rides are just attempts at saving money or avoiding a confrontation with your fear of flying. They’re utilitarian and should not be confused with what you and I consider a true road trip. Road trips should be celebrated. To all of you whimsical travelers who have ever made a mix tape specifically for a road trip (and still nostalgically listen to it today as an iTunes playlist), this one’s for you. 1. Time Doesn’t Matter – Who cares when you get to the destination? You’re with your friends, you’re on vacation and you chose to drive for a reason. Enjoy the scenery. Moon the car next to you. Play License Plate Bingo. Cherish those moments in the car because they will breed the inside jokes that you repeat not just on that trip, but for the rest of your life. It’s not about killing time. That’s murder.

2. Pit Stops – Cracker Barrel. Waffle House. Truck stop diners. Gas station convenience stores. These are a road tripper’s oases. All foods are viable options on the road. I’ve seen vegetarians eat meat and justify it with the “I was on a road trip” excuse. Relish that fast food burger. Enjoy a side of pancakes with your omelet (Perkins, I’m looking at you). Buy chips and cookies and candy that you would never think to eat at home and bring them back to the car to eat on the road. You’re on a road trip. You can eat anything you want!

3. Instant Gratification – Ever been excited to go on a trip only to sit at the airport for five hours? Ever had a vacation delayed because you missed a flight? Road trips can’t be delayed. Traffic? Who cares (see #1)? Are you in the car? Congratulations, your vacation has started.

4. Look at That! – If you’re sitting on a plane, you’re only scenery options are the tiny screen in front of you or, if the person in front of you has reclined, some dandruff and a bald spot. Not exactly riveting entertainment. On a road trip, you never know what you’re going to see next. It could be an amusing sign, a classic car or even a sheep herder who needs to play through. Keep your camera handy because road trips are human safaris!

5. Pranks – Sure, at some point the laughter will die down and your car will become a moving nap box. This is the perfect time to mess whoever passed out. Draw a penis on his face. Scream at the top of your lungs and swerve to trick her into thinking you’re about to be in an accident. Call his mother and tell her he’s dead. OK, that last one may go a bit too far but you catch my drift.

6. Music – Road trips need soundtracks. Mix tapes may have given way to MP3 players, but the effect is the same: sing-alongs! If everyone on the trip brings their iPod, you’ll have music for days. And, if they die (or you get sick of listening to your friends Backstreet Boys “classic mix”), the radio is a viable and underrated option. Radio gets a bad rap, but listening to local stations is a road trip tradition. Blast that country music in the South, listen to some bizarre Christian talk show or find the Top 40 station that every town has and harmonize with Rihanna. Because Rihanna is awesome.

7. Detours – Have you ever asked your pilot to make an unscheduled stop along the way? The FAA frowns on that. But if you’re road tripping and see something like, oh, I don’t know, a hedge maze, you can make an executive decision to get lost in some shrubbery. There are countless amazing destinations just waiting to be stumbled upon. The world’s largest ball of twine is going to call out to you some day. Will you answer?

8. Souvenirs – Road trips generate the best makeshift souvenirs. A menu from a dilapidated diner can easily be slipped into a purse and added to a scrapbook later. Trucker hats from rest stops with innuendo-filled names make great keepsakes (I own a Kum & Go hat that a friend purchased for me on a road trip). One man’s schlock is another man’s memento.

9. Friends Both New & Old – Who needs hotels when you can stay with friends? Road trips are a great excuse to call up old friends to ask if you can stay the night when you pass through town. Or, if people are willing, to stay with friends of friends who are willing to put you up. If you announce on Twitter or Facebook that you need a place to stay en route, you’ll be surprised who volunteers their couch or air mattress. We’re only strangers until we say hello.

10. Bonding – The older you get, the harder it is to spend real quality time with the people you care about. Work will demand more of your attention. Family will become a bigger priority. And the time you have to share with friends will diminish. A road trip is a great opportunity to really be ourselves, relive old glories and create new memories that will sustain us through those dull days at the office. Road trips heighten emotions. Jokes are funnier. Laughs are heartier. And the farts stink more if you lock the windows.

Road trips are less about the destination than the journey. It’s cliché, I know. But if all you cared about was getting from Point A to Point B, you wouldn’t call it a road trip. You’d call it driving. A road trip is its own special category of travel. Enjoy each and every moment of it. And then avoid your tripmates for a few weeks when you get home. You’ll be sick of them by then.

Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Suck

by Annie Scott on

Whether you’re trying to save money or shrink your vacation’s carbon footprint, you probably know, deep down, that road trips suck. There are definitely good things about the open road; the unexpected detours, the wind in your hair (or exhaust in your face, eyes) … but for the most part, sitting in traffic in a closed vehicle for untold hours with people you may or may not normally tolerate for long stretches would probably be one of Dante’s rings of Inferno, had he thought of it. Road trips suck. Just in time for Thanksgiving, let’s go ahead and talk about it. It might make you feel better.

Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Suck

1. Time. Driving takes forever. You’re cramped up in this tiny little space (especially if someone’s behind you and demanding leg room of any kind), and even if you speed, you will probably only end up shaving like fifteen minutes off of your trip — that’s if you don’t get arrested. A flight from New York to LA is about 6 hours and 45 minutes. The drive? According to Mapquest, it’s 42 hours and 45 minutes from Times Square to Laurel Canyon and Sunset Boulevard. And you can never have those 42 hours and 45 minutes back.

2. The whole car has to pull over if one person has to “go.” It’s not fair. The whole trip has to stop because someone had a Mountain Dew. Rest stops have gotten better over the years, but it’s inevitable that you will end up at the one with townies who look like they want to bash your head against the condom dispenser and “Beware Cat Burglar” on the back of the restroom stalls.

3. It wrecks the car. Road trips may stress you out. Well, they also put stress on your car. The miles depreciate its resale value one by one. Your vehicle could also break down, leaving you stranded and having to fly or rent, or worse yet, you could just be stuck knowing that “my car has never run the same since that road trip.” A lot of people will tell you to make sure to get your car serviced before your trip. Ever been to an auto body shop that can’t find something wrong? Me neither. There goes whatever cash you were saving by not flying.
4. Sleepiness. When you’re driving alone late at night, it’s not uncommon (and very dangerous) to get a case of the nods. Worse still is when you have a car full of people with you — and they’re all asleep.

5. Carsickness. If you’re not the driver, you’re bored. That’s just how it is after a couple of hours. Unfortunately, if you’re part of the 80 percent of the population that gets motion sickness (at some point, according to Healthline), just about everything that might be fun to do in a small, enclosed space, like read, play a videogame, or do a puzzle, will make you violently ill. Especially if you’re running on low-budget diner food.

6. Radio fail. However many miles it takes you to get sick of your iPod, that’s about how many miles it probably takes for you to be completely free of all familiar radio stations. Then, you have to scan and scan for something even remotely listenable, and whatever decent signal you do manage to pick up is gone within half an hour to an hour. If you bring a book on tape, you’re similarly doomed because if you’re alone, your mind will wander or you’ll get distracted by navigating. If you’re with others, someone will start talking, or, as before, they’ll all be lulled to sleep, and you’ll be stuck rewinding constantly.

7. Traffic. God forbid you should try and take a vacation the same day as other people, because not only will the airports be dire, but the traffic will be literally catastrophic — and by “catastrophic,” I mean that the stop and go will result in accidents. And it might be your unlucky day. Where I’m from in Minnesota, we have an old saying: “There are two seasons: ‘winter’ and ‘road construction,'” meaning that the traffic is just always bad. Which leads us to …

8. Road rage. Road construction and inclement weather both require people to drive slowly, which can turn even the calmest mind into a raging bear. It’s like sitting in the longest line in the world, and you have no control over when you’ll be out of it. People lose it.

9. The hotels along the way. Road trips longer than ten hours (longer for you hard-core trekkers) generally require you to stay a night somewhere. The trouble is that no one wants to deal with the traffic (or upcharge) of venturing into a city when the whole point is to “make good time” (i.e. sleep and get back on the road). Whether you plan your night in the boondocks in advance or just pull over at any decent-looking motel, the result is about the same, and it’s not pretty. Keep in mind, the remote is the filthiest thing …

10. “Hell is other people.” Jean-Paul Sarte said it best (in French) in his classic play, No Exit: “Hell is other people.” His play features three people in a room with no way out. They discuss their lives, decide they hate each other, decide they forgive each other, then hate each other again, and so on and so forth with no forseeable end. What could be worse? Put them in a car.
Other than that, road trips are fine.

The Alaskan roadhouse experience

by Catherine Bodry on

Last month, Up Here Magazine ran a feature on the end of the roadhouse. Even if you’ve never stopped at a roadhouse while driving long distances, you’re likely familiar with the sight of them: generally a larger main building with a few gas pumps and a small restaurant, and several cabins fanning out on either side. These days, many of them are sagging in the weeds and boarded up.

Up Here cites highway improvements and a drop in tourists for the shuttering of so many roadhouses along the Alaska Highway (or “Alcan”).

Though I usually camp off the side of the road when I dive the Alcan (I’ve made the 2500 mile drive from Seattle to Anchorage five times), I’m familiar with many of the grilled cheese sandwiches available along the way. I even had a toothless, bearded old sourdough recently offer to buy me and my friends shots at a roadhouse along the Richardson Highway. Authentic roadhouse experiences are clearly still available.

Though there are more derelict than functioning roadhouses these days, there is still a few you can visit in Alaska:Eureka Lodge: Billing itself as a lodge, which surely appeals to Anchorage residents wanting to take a long weekend in the mountains, Eureka nonetheless offers the standard roadhouse atmo. Cabins, a restaurant and lounge, a grocery and liquor store and gas pumps make this place a great stopover as you’re rolling into southcentral Alaska.

Steese Roadhouse: Way up on the Steese Highway outside of Fairbanks, this joint doesn’t even have a website. It has all the roadhouse standards, and is pictured above.

Silver Fox Roadhouse: Free coffee, cabins, and local gossip. The roadhouse also appeals to hunters and fishermen.

There are plenty more out there that simply aren’t on the web – maybe it’s time to plan a road trip and discover this dwindling part of American travel.

Great American Road Trip: The Corn Palace

by Jamie Rhein on

It took three trips through South Dakota before we made it to The Corn Palace, a mecca of sorts in Mitchell, a town that seems as if it might be in the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere is a significant detail. Back in 1892, settlers to South Dakota wanted to showcase the harvest bounty of the state and attract people to the area.

If you’ve driven through South Dakota in this decade–it’s a favorite of ours for a Great American Road Trip, something we do each summer, one thing that’s evident is that there are expanses of land between towns. Imagine what 1892 must have looked like. Nothing but land for miles and miles and miles. No gas stations. No houses. No truck stops. Nothing. There wasn’t even a Mount Rushmore.

When the first settlers fashioned a building here out of panels of ears of corn and grains grown in the fertile soil of South Dakota, they probably didn’t imagine that their “The Corn Belt Exposition” would become the ground work for an explosion of gift shops, restaurants and every other touristy schlock a person can think of. Schlock, however, can be fabulous.

If you look beyond the excesses of “stuff” a person can buy in Mitchell, the passion and fortitude of South Dakota is evident in what The Corn Palace is today.

The current building was built in 1921, and the Moorish-style domes and minarets added in 1937. Originally, the building was made of wood, and looked more like a castle. It was also located on another spot in town.

Throughout the structural changes and new location, each year new murals are made of ears of corn and grains. The murals follow a theme and are created by local artists. Last year’s theme, the one we saw, was “Everyday Heroes.”

This year’s theme is a Gadling favorite topic: “America’s Destinations.”

Besides being Mitchell’s main tourist attraction, The Corn Palace, serves as a multi-purpose auditorium and exposition center.

We spent about an hour and a half here. If you go, really take time to look at each of the murals, both outside and inside the building. Although we didn’t take the tour (I think we didn’t have the time), it would be one way to find out more about South Dakota’s agricultural history and the building. For example, the various colors of the mural are due to the grains and type of corn used. There are 13 shades of corn in the current design.

Click here for more facts. As much as The Corn Palace could be touted as tacky, it could be touted as a work of art. Think of the entire building as a thematic art exhibit of sorts.

Plus, the items on sale inside are totally corn related. If anything, browsing through the offerings is a lesson in how much corn inspires people to make knickknacks. Items range from tacky to terrific. I had a blast wandering through the variety and picked up popcorn balls, postcards and a few tasteful presents.

The snack bar outside the auditorium has affordable eats. Of course, we bought ears of corn followed by ice-cream. The ice-cream was not corn related, but South Dakota is hot in the summer and ice-cream bribes make summer road trips bearable.

Although we passed through here last July, August is a month to consider. At the end of the month is the Corn Palace Festival. This year the festival is from August 26-August 30.

Oh, yeah. The Corn Palace definitely fits into budget travel. Admission is free. [all photos by Jamie Rhein]

SkyMall Monday: Leather Driving Gloves

by Mike Barish on

I love a good road trip. There’s nothing better than leaving the SkyMall Monday headquarters and exploring this great country of ours. But the rigors of a long car ride can often be too much for a man to handle. I’m not talking about my legs getting stiff or all the fast food I eat at rest stops. No, it’s the blisters. When I drive, it’s a white knuckle adventure and it wears out my silky smooth, heavily-moisturized skin. I’ve tried steering with my knees, my mouth and my mind, but nothing seems to provide the control and and stability that highway patrolman demand that I possess. What’s a dainty-handed man to do? Rather than loosen my grip or remove the sandpaper steering wheel cover, I’ve decided to learn a lesson from the past. You see, when automobiles first came on the scene, there was romance and style. Drivers were debonair and handsomely attired. They protected their eyes with goggles, necks with scarves and hands with gloves. Because you can’t just grip the wheel, shift the gears and text your mistress with unprotected hands. You need to be safe. You need a coating that only a dead animal hide can give you. You need SkyMall’s Leather Driving Gloves.

Why do you need driving gloves? Well, if you’re like me, even passive activities make you sweat like a pig. Simply getting out of bed in the morning causes me to glisten like a glazed donut. I can’t have the steering wheel slipping out of my hand while on another one of my wacky adventures in the SkyMall Monday Mobile. And speaking of donuts, who wants that mess all over their fingers while driving? Think I’m not fit to operate a motor vehicle or a Gadling post? Well, SkyMall disagrees:

Buttery soft… thin enough to tune the radio. So comfortable they feel like a second skin. Ventilation notches keep your palms dry, even in a tricky hairpin turn.

Finally, a glove that is thin enough to give me that precision radio control that I need. And everyone knows that 88% of palm sweat incidents occur during turns. It’s nice to see a glove that addresses that scourge of the road.

Look, you can drive naked if you want, but when your palms sweat and you crash your car into a tree, you’ll be embarrassed when the police have to use the jaws of life to cut your naked body out of your car. As for me, I’d rather have put on a pair of Leather Driving Gloves and arrive safely at my nudist colony weekend.

Drive safe, SkyMall Maniacs!

Check out all of the previous SkyMall Monday posts HERE.