Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
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Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
<b>“A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane" (<i>Kirkus Reviews</i>),<i> Don't Make Me Pull Over!</i> offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips-before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps.</b><br><br>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 <i>take </i>vacations as <i>survive</i> 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<i> next</i> attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn't believe in bathroom breaks.<br> <br>Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative" (New York <i>Newsday</i>) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer's day" (<i>The</i> <i>Wall Street Journal</i>). 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.<br> <br>An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips" (<i>Publishers Weekly</i>), <i>Don't Make Me Pull Over! </i>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.