Road trip memories from when you were growing up

More of my memories:

That same year, we went on another trip with my uncle’s family, this time to New Orleans. I don’t remember all that much about this trip, other than my cousin getting carsick on Canal Street, where the car stopped, she opened the door and threw up on Canal Street, and then she was okay. We also crossed the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the world’s longest bridge, just to see what it was like. Rather nondescript. It was two lanes then, a single span.

It’s not like you’re going to take kids down Bourbon Street. I guess we did see all the other sights, but I’ve seen them so many times since I can’t remember seeing them for the first time. Other than asking “did pirates really go up and down this alley, next to St. Louis Cathedral?”

Oh yeah, Jackson square didn’t smell too good, thanks to the nearby Jackson Brewery, where they brewed Jax beer.

We also saw the Houston Astrodome, twice. Once, they were playing the Cubs, and we got to see Ernie Banks. The other time they were playing the San Francisco Giants, and we got to see Willie Mays, among others. The second time, Muhammed Ali was present, sitting behind the 1B side dugouts. The announcer recognized his presence, he stood and acknowledged the crowd, and left the game shortly thereafter.

The second time, we went with my Uncle’s family again. There was a guy sitting down in front of us (we were in a mezzanine section for both games) who fell asleep with a lighted cigarette in his left hand, which he was holding out over the aisle. We wanted to see what would happen when the cigarette burned down to his fingers, but he woke up just in time.

My earliest was shortly before I turned 3 (June '54) when we drove Detroit to Florida in our 1950 Plymouth Suburban wagon. Parents, 3 kids, grandmother, 3 days to get there.

The memories I have are pretty episodic, but I believe they're legitimate, not just remembering people talking about things or seeing pictures later. Fat Man's Squeeze/Lookout Mountain made an impression on me.

Nothing noteworthy with my parents, but what came to mind when I saw this thread title was driving, aged 19, with two friends, in a nasty old car, from the far north of England to the French Riviera. We managed to have a few days in St Tropez, which was the trendiest place on earth to be in that summer of '75, and we crossed the English Channel by hovercraft, an experience in itself.

It was, to say the least, a memorable trip, partly because we had nowhere to stay and had to pitch our army surplus tent wherever we could, while trying to avoid the French Police, who didn't approve. It was definitely a growing up experience. Looking back, we were extremely innocent, despite a lot of bravado.

I lost touch with those two friends a few years later and didn't see them again until I got an invite to a surprise 60th birthday party for one of them. I was surprised that our trip to France was still, forty years on, the topic everyone at the party wanted to talk about, including many who weren't born at the time. Some of the stories seemed to have become more than a little exaggerated over the decades, but I didn't confess.

I was born in California but we moved to Denver when I was only a year and a half old. We used to drive up into the Rockies every summer: Estes Park, Red Rocks, Rocky Mtn. National Park, Manitou Springs, Squaw Pass, etc. Beautiful scenery. We had a '49 Ford and then a '54 Chevy and I don't recall having a radio in either. In any case, rock-n-roll hadn't really "taken off" by then, so there weren't stations dedicated to it anyhow.

We drove back out to visit my grandmother in CA. in about 1953. I was only 4 at the time so just remember scattered things: The Painted Desert, Navajo trading posts, Burma Shave signs and oppressive heat in Needles, CA.

Later, after we returned to CA. to live in 1956, we drove up to San Francisco (1958). It was a really beautiful city at that time (by comparison, it's almost unrecognizable now). On that trip I got to see the Big Sur coast and Monterey/Carmel for the first time. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo were pretty much the only towns of any size between L.A. and Monterey at that time, and even they were far smaller than they are today. All the rest was still pretty much wide open.

My folks had friends they'd made during WWII and later working for the Park Service, so we'd often stop and stay a couple nights with them in various towns as we traveled around CA.

On weekends, it was fashionable back then to "go for a drive" (day trip) pretty much in your local area. I remember doing a lot of that both with my family and riding along in the cars of families of other kids I played with.

Just thought of one more, but this time without the parents, but before any of us left the nest.

In 1969, two of us were in college, the youngest still in high school. There was a "pop festival" in Prairieville, Louisiana. The Byrds, Canned Heat, the Yardbirds, Country Joe and the Fish, It's a Beautiful Day, and many others appeared. It was sort of an imitation Woodstock except it was in a car racetrack. So my two younger brothers and I drove from north Louisiana to south Louisiana the enjoy the music.

I don't remember who drove which parts of the trip, but on the way back the middle boy drove (I'm the oldest). It was the first time we were ever in a car that got a speeding ticket. It happened at night near Krotz Springs, which is 40 miles west of Baton Rouge.

Remember those Dodge commercials with the sheriff who says "You in a heapa trouble, boy!"? Those commercial appeared about 40 or 50 years ago. We were stopped by That Guy. Whoever wrote those Dodge commercials must have been stopped for speeding in Krotz Springs, Louisiana.

He didn't like the fact that we had been to that hippie rock festival. He didn't just stop us and give us a ticket--we had to go to his office or courthouse or somewhere. My brother, the driver, had to stand before the Sanhedrin and pay the ticket while my other brother and I sat in the car. Nobody approached our car, but if anybody had asked us if we were with the accused, they would have know by our speaking in accents from the northern part of the state, so we wouldn't have been able to deny knowing him.

I don't remember getting in too much trouble after we got home. Our parents might have enjoyed having their nest pre-emptied for three days.

A trip out west from Detroit. Parents, 3 kids, grandmother and an uncle in a 62 Chevy station wagon. A few pretty vivid memories kept alive by photographs (actually slides), plus the awesomeness of mountains. We primarily spent time (camping) in Colorado. 10 years ago or so my wife and I went to Colorado and a trip up Mt. Evans made me feel like I was having an out of body experience. Part oxygen and part realizing I had been there before. That trip was during the summer of 62, a few months shy of my 3rd birthday.

My father was self employed so we rarely went anywhere, But I will never forget the first time I saw Lake Huron. I was probably 6 or 7 years old.

My family moved from Florida to California when I was two, and I have vivid memories of that trip. For one thing, we crossed the desert in an un-air conditioned car and it was HOT. My mom had an ice chest with wash rags and she would have us wipe our foreheads to keep cool. I remember my dad saying that if the car died, so would we! I remember sleeping against the transmission hump in the rear floor and sleeping to the droning noise. I remember eating single serving cereal and pouring the milk into the box. But most of all I remember the nightmare of stopping for gas and restroom break in Texas during some type of horrible bug swarm. We had to pee but refused to walk over the carpet of bugs, so my father carried first my sister and then me to the restroom and held us in the air while we peed. He was crunching black bugs with every step and they were crawling all over the walls and fixtures and my sister was screaming her head off while my mother cried. It was traumatic!

I had never seen one of those. So where did it get it’s water and how long did it last?

At the bottom of my post is a link that explains how they work.

I wasn't a kid, it was with my kids and a bunch of my in-laws. We drove from Iowa to southwestern colorado via Kansas City where we met up with my wife's sister and her family. We had a log of trials and tribulations.

I don't think we were even an hour out of KC when my BIL's Aerostar tranny gave out. Did I mention that we were all either pulling campers or driving RV's? He was pulling a popup and that van was not up to the task. We pulled off the interstate and parked in the parking lot of the first business we came to...a strip joint that was shaped like a boob! After 5 hours of looking into getting it fixed, we just hooked the popup to my FIL's motorhome, redistributed everyone and continued on.

Later that day we got routed off of I-70 onto a small gravel road where we promptly came to a stop....for like 4 hours. There had been a wreck involving a military convoy and apparently there was some ordinance going off, closing the interstate for quite some time. We had food, drinks and bathrooms, so we were doing OK, but a lot of people were asking if they could use the bathrooms in the campers.

We got going again and were planning to stop in Durango. About 2 hours before we got there, I realized one of the tires on my used Hi-Lo trailer was showing cords....had an alignment issue apparently. We limped into Durango where I got it fixed the next morning. My battery was dead that night, so the power lift on the camper didn't work. We had to plug it in and wait a couple hours before we could set up our camper.

We got to the campground just north of Delores along the Delores river and got set up. A day or two later, I asked my wife where my son was (he was about 3 and a half years old). She didn't know and we panicked big time. He had a toy fishing pole and we were terrified that he'd fallen into the river which was super fast running white water. Turns out he was in my grandparents' camper playing games with grandma.

We went to Pizza Hut one night after a great trip to the Anasazi cliff dwellings. My son announced that he had to poop just as the pizza arrived. He took for....ever. I kept trying to hurry him and he said "Well, if someone would just relax!". I was worried because my wife had organized the order and she's notorious for not getting enough food. Sure enough, we got out there and there was one piece of pizza for me and one for my son. I may have been a little irate. Stopped at a gas station for a damn burrito.

Speaking of cliff dwellings...4-5 foot wide trails with 70' drop offs and no railings. Me with my 18 month old daughter in a backpack and my wife with a death grip on my son's hand. Absolutely fantastic experience, but scary as hell too.

My BIL and I decided to go golfing in Cortez. Great time and I swear to this day we saw Gary Busey. Guy looked just like him and was driving a highly customized golf cart that looked like a mini rolls royce.

The nights were awesome. It would get down close to freezing and my wife, her brother and I would stay up until midnight sitting around the fire in our winter coats/hats, shooting the breeze and star gazing. Easily one of my favorite vacations!

Plenty of road trips during the summer. My grandparents had a lake house at the lake of the ozarks, about a 3.5 hour drive just about every weekend- the whole family; grandparents, aunts & uncles, family friends in a convoy. It was all twisty 1-lane roads all the way to the lake once we turned off I-70 and I used to get horribly carsick. When I was real young I had to sit on somebody's lap in the front seat so I could look out the front window to avoid getting sick. Once I got older an adult just had to surrender the front seat to me once I started feeling woozy, or else we'd have to pull over every 30 minutes so I could blow chunks on the side of the road:)

The first big road trip I remember was in 1991. We drove from St. Joseph MO to upstate New York for my Uncle's wedding. I remember stopping at the arch in St. Louis and eating at a McDonalds inside a riverboat, and going inside the westward expansion museum, but we didn't go inside the arch. The whole family posed for a picture in front of the arch and the sunlight reflecting off of it was so bright that my eyes were burning and watering, and I have my eyes closed in the photo. The rest of the trip was a blur of hotels, hostess mini muffins, my parents playing The Cars greatest hits cassette on repeat and my sisters playing go fish and I Spy.