Don't Make Me Pull Over!

 Book 48 of my 2021 Reading Challenge

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

by Richard Ratay

Summary (via the book jacket)

published 2018

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 in the backseat with loogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next stop, to dealing with a dad who didn't believe in bathroom breaks. Now, decades later, Ratay offers a paean to what was lost, showing how family togetherness was eventually sacrificed to electronic distractions and the urge to "get there now." He reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great.

First Impressions/Judging a Book by Its Cover

I picked up this book from Wall Drug while on vacation with my family.  The cover was engaging with the paneled station wagon driving down the road and it looks like a fun, nostalgic read.

My Opinion

3 stars

The title evokes a feeling right from the start.  Everyone in a certain age bracket knows the exact tone that phrase is delivered in!  I'm not from the seventies (born in 1979) but I still understood the references and feelings.

This was a good combination of personal narrative and historical information.  Fun fact: the person who invented cruise control was blind; as a passenger he would get queasy from the starts and stops of his driver so he found a way to keep things steady.  And as I mentioned, I bought this book on vacation at Wall Drug so it was fun to read Wall Drug's shoutout as a tourist stop.

My dad was definitely a "leave early to make good time and don't stop to pee" kind of guy.  Even as adults, my brother and I would fight with each other to decide who would be the one to ask Dad to stop (we took a few road trips together as adults for family events).  I usually had to suck it up and ask, both as the oldest and as the one who could pull the "I've had 4 kids and my bladder isn't what it used to be" card.  On our family road trips my husband doesn't fare as well...our kids make requests for multiple stops so we're always adding time to the GPS.  He still talks about the time we hadn't even made it 20 miles away from our house before we had to stop, haha!

Quote from the Book

"When you're just six years old, a twenty-hour road trip represents a significant portion of your lifetime...And as any parent knows, if time begins to feel long to a young kid, that kid will make time feel longer for everyone around them."