How a Great American Summer Road Trip in 1965 REALLY Looked Like

In the summer of 1965, the family road trip ran on a different set of rules. The car got packed the night before. The family left in the dark to beat the heat and the traffic, with the kids laid across a back seat that had no belts and a station wagon that had no air conditioning. This is a full day on the road as it actually was: the AAA TripTik marked by hand at the branch and read aloud from the front seat, the Rand McNally atlas that never folded back right, license plates and I Spy in the back, the cooler lunch at a concrete roadside table, the full-service gas station at around thirty-one cents a gallon, and the long hot afternoon on the old two-lane highways before the interstate system was finished. It ends where the day always ended. The orange roof of a Howard Johnson's at the exit, the motel pool as the reward, dinner in a booth, and a postcard written before the lights went out.