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How to Keep Kids (and Everyone Else) Happy on a Road Trip
by Katherine Neer | August 5, 2011
Are we there yet? When are we going to stop? It seems like we’ve been in the car for 30 hours already. I need to go to the bathroom. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I think I’m carsick. Why do we have to go to [insert destination here]? Are we going to have fun when we get there? — If you’re going on a road trip, you’re likely to hear at least a few of these … and just wait until the kids chime in.
Recently, I asked our editors and writers to forward me their favorite travel tunes. Here’s a sampling of songs they sent my way: “Holiday Road,” “America,” “On the Road Again,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.”
Click ahead for more …
I don’t care about the UFOs, but I’d love to drive Extraterrestrial Highway in South-Central Nevada for the nothingness.
Route 375 was renamed Extraterrestrial Highway in 1996 to attract alien-loving tourists. It leads to Area 51, where the military mysteriously tests aircraft and weapons, and pilots regularly make ka-boom sounds with their jets by breaking the sound barrier. And then, you know, you might see an alien fly through the sky.
Did you know that some high schools give out a varsity letter in robotics these days? And that some schools send off their robotics teams to matches with a hearty pep rally? You get what you celebrate, says FIRST President Paul Gudonis, who was kind enough to talk with us the weekend of the FIRST Championship, held here in Atlanta, about a month ago. And this podcast, we were celebrating the sport of competitive robot building.
The countdown is on to the most important day in February — no, not Valentine’s Day. For me, the best day of the month is February 12, which is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Keep your candy hearts and your romantic dinners; give me a Lincoln biography and a top hat. To people in the U.S. who would abandon the penny, I say that you better not do so without putting Lincoln on another coin first.
Road trips are pretty much ingrained in the mythology of the United States — like some last holdout of frontier days when the whole country was open to exploration. And from the way they’re treated in books, movies and songs, you’d think every long-haul jaunt by auto was destined to be a life-changing bildungsroman. But the fact is, lots of road trips turn into monotonous hours spent on interstates with concrete walls and nondescript scenery whipping by at 70 mph (or what have you).
Not for Boaz Frankel, a traveler I found via TreeHugger who’s planning an “Un-road Trip” beginning this April. Frankel will explore the United States for 10 weeks — an ambitious road trip even if we left it there — expect there’s one catch. He won’t be taking a car.
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