"A 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. The 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 ...
Read More
"A 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. The 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. Now, 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. An "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.
Read Less
Add this copy of Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the to cart. $21.72, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2019 by Scribner Book Company.
The author Richard Ratay relates his experiences during his family's road trips. The problem is he was born to late to understand what family road trips were really like during the hey-day of road trips which was the 1960's not the late 1970's and early eighty's that he details. Plus he comes from a family that is taking road trips to country clubs. LAME! Playing the newest video games in a Ramada Inn has nothing in common with the type of road trips my family and I took in the 1960's. Also most of his road trip experience was gained East of the Mississippi River. A true road trip needs to be taken out west, and a least one needs to be on route 66.
