Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip - Richard Ratay

\nA lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane (Kirkus Reviews), Don't Make Me Pull Over offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips--before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps. \nThe birth of America's first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming--sans seatbelts --to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn't so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them--from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn't believe in bathroom breaks. \n \nNow, decades later, Ratay offers an amiable guide...fun and informative (New York Newsday) that goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer's day (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot land yachts, oasis-like Holiday Inn Holidomes, Smokey-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson's ice cream, and the thrill of finding a good buddy on the CB radio. \n \nAn informative, often hilarious family narrative that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips (Publishers Weekly), Don't Make Me Pull Over reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country's, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together--for better and worse--have largely disappeared.\n