Don’t Make Me Pull Over by Richard Ratay, is a Baby Boomer’s recounting of the countless road trips his family took in the 1970s and 80s.
Vacation Trips The summer of 2020 was interesting in lots of ways, including the limitations on vacationing because of the virus. Our large neighbor to the north has a hard 14-day quarantine mandate for visitors, so Maine will not be Vacationland this year unless that changes soon.
Even for people who choose to venture out of their lock-ups and travel, things will be dicey. Travelers will have to be careful in choosing motels and restaurants, and good luck dealing with bathrooms along the way. Once you arrive, vacation destinations will have lots of limitations on how they can operate. In short, this will not be a Dirty Dancing summer, with hundreds of people congregating up close and personal. If that Catskills Mountain resort dared to put on the final tumultuous dance scene today, they would be busted.
Putting on my hat from Bob in the Basement’s Book Blurbs (not the Red Sox cap with the Johnny Damon coiffure), another book I read during this extended timeout was about vacation trips in the 1970s. Richard Ratay’s Don’t Make Me Pull Over! is aptly titled if you recall your car vacation trips as a kid or parent. It’s more about the history of what we needed to take extended car trips – good roads including the Interstate Highway System with rest stops, dependable cars, station wagons, AAA TripTiks, inexpensive motels, mindless games to keep the kids amused, and 800 numbers to call for motel reservations.
The founder of Holiday Inn was a vacationing father who was unhappy with the fact that in the 1950s motels charged extra for each kid. By 1959 he had 100 locations. He figured out that building motels near the new Interstate highways was a good idea. By 1975, there were 1,700 Holiday Inns.
As a young man, Howard Johnson from Quincy, MA, started an ice cream stand in 1925. He figured out that doubling the amount of butterfat was the key to success and he was right. He opened another stand on the beach in Quincy and was soon selling lots of cones, up to 14,000 a day. He added food – fried clams! – and eventually purchased exclusive rights to build on the new turnpikes and ended up controlling over 1,000 restaurants. Today there is just one Howard Johnson’s left in Lake George, NY, but for many travelers the restaurant with the orange roof was true comfort food.
The author also references his family’s idiosyncrasies and memorable moments in their vacation trips, usually from Wisconsin to Florida. As one of the cover blurbs notes, “Captures all the adventure, bonding, desperate conflict, and existential self-interrogation that is only made possible by hours (and hours) on the road with your family.” Many Americans of a certain age can relate to that.
Reading the book of course reminded me of my own road trips, both as a kid in the 1950s and 60s and as a parent in the 1980s and 90s.
The Gaudets moved a lot. I lived in 6 states while growing up and went to three high schools in three states.
It was always concerning when I’d come home from school to find that my parents had moved again. Those scamps! Fortunately, I was friendly with the mailman and could get the forwarding address to track them down.
We moved from Massachusetts to Virginia in 1954. Every August we would do a road trip and rent a cottage on Nantasket Beach, back when the amusement park was world-class.
The trips to the Bay State were interesting. We always left after dinner so my father could drive all night to stay cool (no AC) and to avoid traffic. We had Ford station wagons to which Dad added a mattress to the way back. It was not-so-comfortable accommodations for the five kids. Of course we had no seat belts (and some of us had no seats) but somehow we always made it. We went over the George Washington Bridge, which was amazing to my siblings and me if we weren’t asleep.
My wife’s family also did lots of road trips with lots of kids so once we got married Sue and I were destined to become our parents and go on the road again.
She was from Houston so every summer in an even-numbered year we would drive there and other years we would fly. Between us, we had friends all over the country so we would plan the trip visiting people we knew in Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, New York, Washington DC, and such. We ended up driving about 4,500 miles on each jaunt except for our 1992 trip to the Grand Canyon, which ate up 7,000 miles. That one was out of the script to National Lampoon’s Vacation movie.
We rented a new Volvo wagon (Hertz was delighted when I returned the car after putting over 7,000 miles on it in three weeks). Along the way we alternated motels with camping, which seemed like a good idea before the trip.
We camped in Durango, CO, next to a beautiful stream that was idyllic until the raging mountain thunderstorms developed and almost blew us away. Here are two before-and-after pictures of Caroline next to the peaceful stream and, as the skies were filled with thunder and lightning, terrified in our tent. Looking back, perhaps pitching a tent when we had wind of 50 to 60 MPH was not a great idea.
Going over the Rockies was interesting since the car was a tad underpowered and our ketchup and mustard containers exploded with the change in air pressure. We camped in the worst campground ever near the Grand Canyon.
Other trips were also memorable. One special memory is of us in 1994 driving up to a motel in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and finding it hard to see the motel because of the thousands of locusts that were swarming around the lights. Getting into our room was interesting. On another trip, I managed to lose a running bag with my clothes in it somewhere as it fell of the top of the car. Chevy Chase would have been proud of me.
On the other hand, the Grand Canyon is amazing and we did go to the farm where Field of Dreams was filmed in Dyersville, Iowa, and we did camp at a campground in the middle of the beautiful corn-growing country and we did end up in Houston for a nice visit with Sue’s family.
On other trips we’d go to national parks (we had a snowball fight in August in Rocky Mountain National Park), Mount Rushmore, and Wall Drug next to the Badlands in South Dakota. There are lots of stores in its 80,000 square feet, including several restaurants, an art gallery, and an 80-foot brontosaurus sculpture. Wall Drug is no CVS, although there is a drug store.
