Old School Road Trips

Kids these days, they have it so easy.  This has been a generational lament since the Neanderthal days, back when Lothar grumbled, "Thag has it so easy now that we have a wheel.  Back in my day I had to do yardwork pushing a squarebarrow."  However, I think I have a legitimate gripe when comparing road trips between my heyday as a kid in the 70's and what my daughter gets to enjoy now.

Growing up near Chicago we would usually travel twice a year to Minnesota to see family at holidays or visit the lake cabin in Alexandria.  This was back in the days of the 55 MPH speed limit so it was a good eight hour trip between Chicago and the Twin Cities each way.  Like most other families contemplating similar trips those days, we drove it.  And there wasn't much to do in a car back then.

Our family vehicle for road trips was a 1973 Chevrolet Impala station wagon.  This may have been the largest, heaviest family car ever built.  It was thick.  It was girthy.  It was brown, inside and out.  To combine two Chevy Chase quotes from two separate movies:  "It was an Oldsmo-Buick Family Truckster."  Later on, when I had to choose between that car and a small, manual transmission Toyota for my driver's test, I took the stick shift.  There was no parallel parking the Impala.

The boys at OPEC probably slapped each other on the backs and ordered another round of luxury yachts when this one rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.  The doors appeared to be 1 foot thick and required two hands to swing shut.  My dad was pleased that an entire 4x8 sheet of plywood could fit flat in the wagon area.  Every time you stepped on the accelerator Exxon placed another order for light crude.

Wanting to preserve their substantial investment in this car, my parents ordered an aftermarket covering to protect the vinyl back seats.  This amounted to reupholstering plastic with plastic.  Was it a smooth, comfortable material?  Oh no.  It had a raised waffle pattern on the seat where your tush and legs go.  If you're wearing shorts, as a young lad is often wont to do, you get up from the seats after a long drive and your legs look like Eggos. 

We would get up early and shove off from the suburbs of Chicago.  The first parts of a long trip are relatively exciting since you're on vacation and the new-ness of the trip hasn't worn off.  For this part of the trip my dad provided his traditional entertainment with his usual gripes about the I-94 tollbooths.  "They were supposed to take these down when the highway was paid for years ago!"  Check that one off the trip list.

We would get into Wisconsin in about an hour and then the doldrums would set in.  Nowadays, my daughter has an iPod for music, a Nook for reading books, and an entertainment system in the car for watching movies.  Once we even plugged in the Xbox so she and a buddy could play video games the entire way.  Someday she'll probably have a cell phone for texting and yakking with her friends about how her dad is such a dufus.

What did I have?  I had the window.  I could gaze out of the car and watch endless farms roll by.  Not exactly a Pixar classic.

I had the aforementioned plastic wrap:  I could amuse myself by pressing down on the waffle pattern with my fingers and see how long before it reformed its shape.  That was good for about 2 minutes.  478 minutes to go.

We had the alphabet game.  You'd look for billboards and road signs that started with letters in order of the alphabet.  Quaker State and Dairy Queen were highly coveted, as were any kind of wildlife/varmint X-ing signs.  If you saw an X or Q sign you were a family hero.

I had a sister but we didn't talk much so she provided me with no amusement.  I could have read a book but would have gotten car sick well before lunch.  There was no music.  The car had the default AM radio, and that survived only because the dealer wouldn't give my non-musically-inclined parents a rebate for taking it out.  I'm not sure if it would have helped anyway.  Radio stations were probably littered with disco at the time.  I say this with some confidence because I remember my older cousin's radio alarm going off twice when I stayed in his room at my aunt and uncle's house in St. Paul.  Both times it was playing "The Hustle."  As far as I know, no other song was released between 1974 and 1977.

We had a car-based bingo game that appeared to be from the 50's.  If you saw a sight that was represented on your bingo board you'd close the cover on that item and hope for 5 in a row.  The manufacturer's address was on the cardboard bingo boards which helped date it from a bygone era:  1) no zip code was listed after the city and state,  2) the telephone number had letters in the exchange, and 3) it was made in the U.S.

One advantage I had over kids of today:  no seat belts!  I was free to roam around the cavernous back seat with no consideration given to modern safety policy.  If we had had an accident I would have been a 60 pound missile flying toward the windshield (which, given the ponderous nature of the car's design, was probably leaded glass and I would have bounced right back).  This mobility kept the typical kid antsy-ness somewhat muted.

Another thing we didn't have was stops at gas stations.  First of all, gas stations back then only sold gas, strangely enough.  The days of gas stations with attached supermarkets-bordering-on-malls were still years away.  So it was drive up, tell the guy "fill 'er up regular", and never get out of the car.  "Regular," of course, meant with lead, at about 64 cents a gallon.  Man, I'm old.  Second, the Impala apparently had an 84 gallon gas tank.  So even though our mileage was horrendous we could go a fair clip before needing to re-fuel.

The town of Mauston, WI will forever hold a special place in my heart because that's where we'd stop for lunch.  By late morning we'd be passing Baraboo, home of the mystical, enchanted Wisconsin Dells.  The Dells were mystical and enchanted to me because I'd constantly see ads for it all the time on Chicago TV.  The ads always depicted water activities and kids having fun.  But we NEVER went there because our vacation destination was always Minnesota.  I didn't get to the Dells until my mid-30's.  And by then I was paying for it which removes all enchantment and mysticism.

We'd pull into the Country Kitchen -- always the Country Kitchen -- and I already knew what I was going to order:  spaghetti.   It was my go-to restaurant order unless we were going out for pizza.  I don't recall if they had kid's menus back then -- I think I was just ordering the most palatable thing off the regular adult menu.  Occasionally I'd mix in a curveball and get the French toast.  But only if I was feeling crazy.  Unlike today, there weren't 12 well-known restaurants at each highway exit.  Maybe you'd get a McDonald's, but often it was Aunt Maude's Grease Griddle where squirrel may or may not have been on the menu.  At least at Country Kitchen you knew what you were getting.

Bellies full, we'd clamber back into the Impala and resume the trip.  After about 20 minutes the excitement of eating and getting out of the car had faded and we were back to the sensory deprivation tank of the back seat.  The window had a rolling TV show of corn, corn, cow, corn, silo, cow, farmhouse, bizarre roadside attraction such as a giant plaster moose, corn, silo, corn.

When we crossed the St. Croix river and saw the "Welcome to Minnesota" sign personal adrenaline levels went up.  We're close!  (Relatively speaking.)  Civilization looms!  I learned how to spot the Snelling Ave. exit early in life.  The image of the diamond-shaped reflector sign at the base of the exit ramp was stamped in my brain well before that of, say, Big Bird's or Cookie Monster's.  After that it was just a few minutes to my aunt and uncle's house and the return of sanity.  I would roll out of the car and teeter around while I regained my land legs.  Then I would try to recover before we had to make the return trip in a week.

Compare this to my wife and daughter, who on one trip without me stayed in the car longer than necessary so that they didn't interrupt the audio book they were listening to on the trip. Times have changed.