Road Trip!: Memories from the Road

Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip – Richard Ratay – (Scribner)

My oldest cousin had just gotten married, and at 16 I had been an usher in her wedding party. Once the wedding festivities had wrapped up, I was going to be a participant in the ages old family tradition, at least in our family, of the mega-family road trip! Yep, not just Mom and Dad, it was the full on family rodeo; Aunts, Uncles, cousins, grandparents, the whole gang was piling into a caravan of big old, 1970s era land yachts and heading down the road to a far flung cabin in the woods for a glorious retreat to the wilds of Pennsylvania.

I remember it well, not because of the destination; a dilapidated old pile along a creek with stacks upon stacks of bunk beds to sardine the “kids” or the one redeeming feature, an ancient console stereo that we played the one album (Elton John’s live record Here and There) I managed to sneak into the luggage over and over again on the rainy days. No, what made it oddly memorable to this day, was folding my six foot plus sized frame into the back seat next to a couple of cousins who almost right on departure hunched straight forward over tattered pillows from some long disposed of, smelly sofa and were almost instantly asleep. At the time I suspected my straight-laced Aunt and Uncle of somehow slipping the pair some sort of mickey, that had put them out so they wouldn’t have to deal with the inevitable “are we there yet?” questions.

This slightly creepy memory was dredged up from my subconsciousness by Richard Ratay’s humorous and informative travelogue/memoir, Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip. Right from the start Ratay hit a home run for me conjuring up not only that bizarre trip, but nightmarish memories of fighting who would get stuck riding on the “hump” the ubiquitous Quonset hut style covering of the rear wheel driveshaft and the too numerous to mention road side attractions that my Dad never could resist making a pit stop at. My teeth still hurt at the memory of numerous stops at the coal mine tour gift shop (!) to pick up a box of “coal lump” licorice candy, each box coming with a nifty little sledge hammer to break up the chunks of black candy.

Ratay offers up more than just a recounting of the now, sadly, long lost family road trip, he garnishes this tale with some great road side trivia and history and factoids about this once great mode of vacationing. While we all grumbled about the biannual, seven hour road trips to visit my grandparents and various aunts, uncles, and cousins, Don’t Make Me Pull Over, serves as a reminder of simpler times without smartphones and tablets, when traveling families would play car games and actually talk to each other. It brought back cool memories of wood paneled cars, driving by the iconic Bob’s Big Boy mascot figure outside the burger joint and the home of the Little League World Series.