THE ROAD TRIP TRADITION.

Never mind those temporarily high motor fuel prices, "America's Love Affair With the Road Endures," according to Salena Zito.

Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east, and west is almost patriotic in concept.

Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery, and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local state park. One of the most interesting things we could do this summer is take a road trip, large or small, to experience the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ah, yes, the Lincoln Highway.  "Not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the first seedling mile of the Lincoln Highway, an attempt by early twentieth-century entrepreneurs to build a paved highway from coast to coast.  The effort was as much an attempt to lobby for federal funds as it was to improve the roads."

It isn't a family road trip without at least some squabbling among the kiddos in the back seat.  Current secretary of transportation Sean Duffy offers reminiscences that ought be familiar to many a reader.

Duffy said that road trips in his family were a great adventure, filled with awe, sibling fighting, and stays in campgrounds and motels. They began with his love of seeing the country from the ground at an early age. "When I was growing up, my parents would take us on road trips all the time, and we'd go to Florida, Arizona, California," he said.

As one of 11 children, Duffy said that one can imagine there were plenty of "Don't make me turn this car around" and "Do you want to get out of this car and walk?" moments directed at the backseat.

I wonder if any parent ever made good on that "turn this car around" threat.

The Lincoln Highway emerged a seedling mile or so at a time.  In much of the country, what became Universal Standard Highway Thirty got the Lincoln Highway tag, although the original routing was much more convoluted.  One requires a good map simply to get from Geneva to Dixon in Illinois.

Once the Universal Standard design and numbering scheme caught on, Good Roads boosters made the case for assigning the number 66 to a southwesterly-heading highway linking Chicago with Los Angeles by way of Oklahoma and Winslow, Arizona.  "For a hundred years, the storied American highway has been the road of reinvention."  On one hand, that became one of the roads for those road trips, coming as close as it did to the Grand Canyon and assorted other western national parks.  On the other hand, that was for hardscrabble Okies headed to California for another grab at the ring.  National Review's Andrew Stuttaford takes up the story.

Route 66 could have sold itself, but [Oklahoma Good Roads promoter Cyrus] Avery would never have left it at that. He and some associates founded the U.S. Highway 66 Association to lobby for improvements to a road that still needed a lot of work, from more paving to smarter routing, and to promote it too. They quickly dubbed it the “Main Street of America,” a name both grandiose and, by conveying a sense of an extended hometown, reassuring. And then, when Oklahoma’s Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash in 1935, it became the Will Rogers Highway too. In those years Route 66 added another identity to the pile, that of an escape route for those trying to flee the Dust Bowl. It became, wrote John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, “the mother road, the road of flight.”

Of all Route 66’s nicknames, the “mother road” is the one that still comes first to mind, even if its origins are hazier now, eclipsed in many ways by a broader interpretation of the words that followed. Route 66 became the American ideal of the “road of flight,” not from agricultural depression but from the everyday, the humdrum — sometimes temporary, sometimes, in this land of reinvention, forever, sometimes, as with Steinbeck’s Joads, desperate — but often for the adventure, for the hell of it, for the just-get-up-and-go.

It might be the road-trip kitsch, not the hardscrabble migration, that got most of the popular attention.  There was even an early-1960s adventure show called Route 66 despite much of the action taking place well off that road.

As the Interstate Highway System took shape, the roads of the old Universal System of Highways were degraded.  Through Illinois, for instance, much of the final path of Highway 66 was four-lane, divided.  In a few places, those lanes became the lanes of Interstate 55, particularly between towns, and through more than a few towns, one pair of lanes became a bike trail.

The act of widening Route 66 and posting it for faster speeds between towns led to the end of another road-trip tradition also observing its centennial this year.  "This year marks the centennial of Route 66, and it’s also the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Burma-Shave signs, a series of five or six simple signs that entertained motorists with rhyming poems."

IF YOU DON'T KNOW
WHOSE SIGNS
THESE ARE
YOU CAN'T HAVE DRIVEN
VERY FAR
BURMA SHAVE

Those signs came down in 1963, which might, between the abandonment of the North Shore Line and the Kennedy assassination, be the year that marked the end of the American High and the beginning of generalized E-T-T-S.

There is one Burma Shave jingle, however, that we hope will not be validated.

IF A TRIP TO MARS, YOU'D EARN, REMEMBER, FRIEND, THERE'S NO RETURN.

Have a thoughtful Memorial Day.  The ceremonial raising of the flag to full staff at noon is the official starting signal for summer and the road trip season.