Tag Archives: Texas

the IBIT TRAVEL DIGEST 11.18.12

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Sahara Desert caravan

The Sahara Desert. Think you could survive here? | ©Simone Matteo Giuseppe Manzoni — Dreamstime.com

The good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

THE WORLD’S DRY PLACES
This edition of the IBIT Travel Digest is dedicated to my editor, P.A. Rice, whose name you’ll often see at the bottom of my blog posts. In addition to being a fine writer in her own right and a good friend of many years, she loves — I mean LOVES! — the desert.

Having been born in Louisiana and spent most of my life in coastal California, I’ve never been a desert person. Too much sand, too little shade, too many things that stick or bite you.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s usually hotter than all Hell? Unless, of course, it’s freezing cold.

But when she’s in the desert, she sees — or more accurately, feels — something different. Something profound. Something wondrous. And if you try looking at it through her eyes, you may start to see the desert in the same way.

It’s a land that makes you accept it on its own terms. But if you can do that, it will treat you to breathtaking sunrises and sunsets, night skies overflowing with stars and enough solitude to let you have meaningful conversations with your own soul.

I’ve seen sunlight and clouds combine over the Imperial Valley of California in ways that that I’ve seen nowhere else on Earth.

And as evidenced by this story in the London newspaper, The Guardian, she’s not alone in her appreciation of the world’s driest places.

The article lists incredible deserts all over the world — and tours to let you explore them. Deserts in Arizona, North Africa, Mongolia, and countries you may not even think of in terms of deserts.

Like Spain.

Don’t worry…it’s a DRY heat.

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LOW-FARE AIR TO AFRICA
easyJet is Britain’s largest airline and one of the principal low-fare airlines in Europe. It’s orange-and-white Airbus A319s and A320s are a common slight all over the continent.

Now, according to The Guardian, easyJet’s Greek founder is bringing the low-fare airline concept to the Mother Continent.

Fastjet has taken off, literally, in Tanzania.

The implications of this are huge. Africa is one of the largest and most populous of all the world’s continents — and also by far the one most under-served by the world’s airlines.

If Fastjet succeeds, spreads and inspires the rise of competitors, it could revolutionize African air travel.

Stay tuned.

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HIGH-STYLE HIGHWAY STOPS
If it’s been awhile since you took a cross-country road trip — and at today’s gasoline prices, who could blame you? — you will be forgiven if you go slack-jawed when you see what’s happening to highway rest stops these days.

I got my own inkling of that a couple of weeks ago on Interstate 5 in Southern California, heading back to San Diego.

There’s long been a rest stop overlooking the coast within the boundaries of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, but I hadn’t stopped there in years. Small, nondescript, nothing special.

My, how things have changed. Two buildings are now three. Multiple large, clean restrooms, snack and soft-drink vending machines that actually work. And I didn’t check, but it might even have wifi now.

But as you’ll see in this Washington Post travel story, that’s nothing.

America’s rest stops are going upscale, so much so that some are on the verge of becoming destinations themselves. Check it out.

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AND FINALLY…
And as long as we’re toying with the idea of hitting the road again, the financial magazine Kiplinger offers up this list of its 10 cheapest American cities for a good vacation.

The first thing you’ll notice about this list is that only two of its top 10 cities are anywhere west of the Mississippi River. One of them is Phoenix, AZ.

Desert. It figures.

But that’s not as amazing as the city that appears at the top of the Kiplinger list, the Number 1 destination for a cheap American vacation.

Drum roll, please…Riverside, CA.

When I first saw this, my initial reaction was “really?” Then I recalled my several drives through Riverside with my family enroute to and from family visits in Texas and Louisiana, not to mention my stops there on the train.

After thinking it all over, my reconsidered thought was…REALLY???

If you think you can make a compelling case that the Kiplinger folks are right, drop me a comment here on the blog or send an email to greg@imblacknitravel.com. I’m willing to be persuaded.

Just be prepared to work at it.

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And now, here’s the Digest:

AIR
from Travel Weekly
American Airlines adds service to Europe, Asia and Latin America from its hubs in Dallas and Chicago. The flights themselves don’t begin til next year, but you can start booking them now.

from the Huffington Post
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what about the skies of the beholder? Would you fly in airplanes as ugly as these? SLIDESHOW

from CNN
The A350-AXWB is the lightweight, long-range airline that Airbus intends to compete with Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Will it catch on with the world’s airlines…and more importantly, their passengers?

LAND
from The Daily Beast
Where to find some of the world’s tastiest cheap eats. No surprise, most of them are in Asia.

from AARP
Airline etiquette — how to deal with rude passengers in-flight.

from USA Today
Is a steady regimen of business travel hazardous to your health?

SEA
from USA Today
NCL joins rival Carnival in selling all-you-can-drink packages aboard its cruise ships.

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AFRICA
from allAfrica.com
British travelers vote their favorite city in the world. New York? Toronto? Paris? Surprise…it’s Capetown, South Africa.

from the Daily Observer (Gambia) via allAfrica.com
For foreign tourists, visiting the Gambia often means getting bum-rushed by “bumsters.” Mostly, they’re just a nuisance, but they can be a BIG nuisance.

from allAfrica.com
An unlikely alliance of US environmentalists, herdsmen from Somalia and financiers from China is joining forces in Kenya to save the rarest antelope in Africa. The hirola is closer to extinction than giant pandas, mountain gorillas or rhinos…and cannot survive in zoos.

from CNN
How to survive in the Sahara with the world’s original desert survival experts, the Tuareg.

AMERICAS
from the New York Times
Atlantic City refuses to bow down to Superstorm Sandy.

from Travel Weekly
And speaking of Sandy, resorts in the Caribbean are still reeling from its impact, these days in the form of widespread cancellations from US travelers. Good time to swoop in and negotiate a bargain, perhaps?

from the New York Times
Seth Kugel loves São Paulo. He wants you to love it, too. WARNING: You may have to work at it.

from the Washington Post
Have a thing for ghost towns? Then check out a pair of abandoned mining towns in Chile. SLIDESHOW

from the Huffington Post
For all the gloom-and-doom talk in the mainstream media about the demise of American manufacturing, there are a lot of local factories still making their own products — and making money doing it. Some of them will let you come in and watch. SLIDESHOW

ASIA/PACIFIC
from The Guardian (London UK)
Want to see where The Hobbit lives…at least on film? Head for New Zealand. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” hits theaters next month. Check out the incredibly beautiful land where it was shot.

from CNN
The Hello Kitty restaurant in Beijing. The pink ambiance will make you smile. The food will not.

EUROPE
from Travel Weekly
Greece is pining for more US tourists.

from The Guardian (London UK)
Some of the lesser known but no less worthy attractions of St. Petersburg, Russia.

from the New York Times
The Prague that hides in plain sight.

from the Washington Post
Here in the States, writers joke about tree-hugging hippies who think they can sing their way to revolution and freeom. In the scenic Baltic republic of Estonia, the people there actually did.

TEXAS: I’ve been railroaded

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© Nico Smit | Dreamstime.com

I was certain I’d never want to visit the state for fun — until I found out about the Museum of the American Railroad.

When it comes to our preferences, we can be pretty extremist. We like what we like, we loathe what we loathe and that’s that. The older I get, though, the more of a flip-flopper I’m becoming.

As a kid, I sternly rejected an invitation by friends in San Francisco who wanted to introduce me to this Mexican food called tacos. It would be almost a decade before I relented.

That was many years — and many tacos — ago.

I was just as absolutist about music. On my transistor radio (ask your grandfather what a transistor was), it was R&B, rock ‘n roll and jazz. In that order. Period.

Classical? Not really. Folk? Not so much.

Country? Oh, HELL no!

Then I heard the guitar of Andres Segovia. The protests inspired by the Vietnam war introduced me to folk music. And I eventually learned that some of my favorite R&B songs by artists like Ray Charles drew their inspiration from country tunes, and vice versa.

That’s when I realized that if you listen to any musical form long enough, you’ll hear something you like.

PLACES YOU LOVE — OR NOT
What’s this got to do with travel? Simply this: Absolutes apply just as much to places.

There are places we fall in love with. I mean that helpless, hopeless, head-over-heels variety of love. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know some of mine. San Francisco, London, Paris, Vancouver, Amsterdam.

It works the same way in reverse. There are places where we would sooner spend a night curled up in a cactus Snuggie before we’d spend a day of vacation there.

At the top of my list: Texas.

Too big. Too flat. Too hot and too dry — unless, of course, it’s too humid.

Above all, too Texan.

Texas is where I annually lost my mind as a kid during my family’s summer drives across the state — and back.

How bored was I? When you start memorizing AAA road maps while lying on an ice chest behind the front seat of a 1958 Buick, you have reached the ultimate in desperate circumstances.

Unlike the Beatles song, Texas to me was a long road that didn’t wind.

TARBALLS AND BROKEN BONES
Texas is where my cousins in Houston taught me to look forward to summer downpours — so we could go play in the flooded streets.

Texas is where I played in the surf at Galveston, and came out with shorts stained by tarballs from offshore oil wells.

Texas is where a wasp crawled up my shirt sleeve and stung me in the armpit, where I broke my thumb in a car crash — and I wasn’t even driving.

For a long time, I wondered why California got earthquakes and Texas got barbecue, when it clearly should’ve been the other way around.

After the crash, I was about ready to rename Texas the Leave Me Alone Star State. And I fully expected it to stay that way for the rest of my life.

In hindsight, I should’ve known better.

It started with an item that turned up on my Facebook from TrainWeb. An announcement:

“Museum of the American Railroad ready to break ground and move to Frisco.”

I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. One of my favorite things in the world — trains — was coing to one of my favorite places in the world — San Francisco — in the form of a major museum?

FRISCO, NOT “FRISCO”
Mentally, I was already making air reservations to SFO, planning my BART ride into The City and trying to decide whether I wanted to stay in a hotel on Nob Hill, in the South of Market or in Fisherman’s Wharf.

I was so happy, I was even willing to overlook TrainWeb’s reference to San Francisco as “Frisco,” which for more than a few San Franciscans, marks you as a tourist and a legitimate target for disdain.

Then I clicked on the link and read the Dallas Morning News story. the museum was indeed moving to Frisco.

Frisco, TX. A suburb of Dallas.

A moment earlier, I’d been dying with excitement. Now, I was just dying. The crash of my disappointment probably tripped seismographs in a dozen western states.

Grudgingly, I checked out the museum’s Web site.

Wow, these guys are serious! Steam locomotives, electric and diesel-electric locomotives of the old streamlined types that my generation grew up seeing.

Cabooses. Every kid I went to school with — the boys, anyway — at some point in their adolescence fantasized about riding in one of these.

Pullman sleeper cars of the type one of my great-uncles worked on from the age of 15 as a Pullman porter out of New Orleans.

(That part of American railroad history resides in Chicago at the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum. If you’re interested in the history of the Civil Rights movement as well as American railroading, you owe it to yourself to check it out).

It all harkens back to the days when trains were not only the best way, but the only way to move around the country efficiently and in any degree of comfort.

If nothing else, it’ll give you an idea of just how goos our rail system used to be — before freeways, airlines, Congress and Amtrak, among others, nearly killed it.

Even better, the new museum is being built in the style of one of America’s grand old railroad stations, the North Station in Boston.

Oh yeah, I can get into this.

So here I sit, facing the harsh realization that I may have to rethink my perpetual dismissal of Texas. People who like trains this much much can’t be all bad.

You think they have decent barbecue in Frisco?

Eleanor Joyce Toliver-Williams, 1936-2011

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It’s not about where or how you start. It’s about where and how you finish.

Let me pause for a moment to note the recent passing of Eleanor Joyce Toliver-Williams. But it’s her life that was truly noteworthy for a couple of reasons, the first of which has to do with travel.

Mrs. Toliver-Williams was the first black American woman ever to be certified in the United States as an air traffic controller.

You can read her obituary here.

Being the first African-American woman entrusted as a controller by the Federal Aviation Administration would by itself would be achievement enough for a lot of folks, but not her.

Mrs. Toliver-Williams went on to become the first African-American woman to run what’s known as an Air Route Traffic Control Center.

Each of America’s 22 “centers,” as they’re known in FAA jargon, controls a chunk of US airspace covering hundreds or thousands of square miles, and has hundreds or thousands of flights passing through it 24/7, which gave Mrs. Toliver-Williams a fearsome responsibility every time she came to work.

Even that, however, doesn’t quite give you the full picture.

The Cleveland center that she ran in Oberlin, OH just happens to be officially the busiest such center in the United States, and possibly in the world.

If you flew anywhere within about a 500-mile radius of Cleveland during the last quarter of the 20th century, anywhere over or near the states of Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, this lady had your life — and that of everyone else on the plane with you — in her hands.

The fact that you’re reading this now suggests that she did all right.

The other reason her life and career are worthy of note involves how she came to run the Cleveland center.

A native of Texas, she didn’t join the FAA until after moving from Texas to Alaska. She started with their Anchorage headquarters back in 1968.

As a janitor.

She worked her way up from that into the steno pool as a secretary. But she never stopped working, never stopped learning, never stopped pushing forward.

Until finally, she pushed her way right into an air traffic control tower.

Even then, it didn’t all happen immediately. She was certified by the FAA in 1971. It took another five years for her to get an actual assignment as a controller.

Sixteen years later, she was running the Cleveland center, where multiple controllers took charge of the air traffic, but all of whom answered to her.

There are a lot of reasons to be awed by this woman and the career she carved out for herself, but I’m struck most of all by the way it stands out in stark contrast to the attitudes of too many of our kids.

You know, the ones who consider things like working in a convenience store or a fast-food joint to be beneath them? The ones who want it all, but only if they can have it all now?

If life were like a game of baseball, we’d see that barest handful of us hit a homerun right off the bat, so to speak, while a few others seem to have been born standing on third base.

The rest of us have to bunt our way onto first, steal second and third, and then run like hell for a chance to score.

Sometimes, life gifts you with instant gratification, the homerun on your very first swing. More likely, you’re going to have to run the bases yourself like everyone else, one after the other, work like hell.

Just like she did.

I’m sure there were people in Anchorage who saw Mrs. Toliver-Williams with her mop and thought no further of it or her, figuring that was just her lot in life.

I’m equally sure that some of her friends in Texas said something to the effect of, “Child, why on Earth do you want to go all the way up to Alaska?”

She didn’t let the distance, the strangeness of a new environment, or anything else, deter her. She didn’t buy into anyone else’s pre-conceived idea of her destiny. She stayed on the grind and kept her eyes on the prize.

Until she got it.

Decades later, millions of air travelers in the United States, none of whom ever saw her face, heard her voice or knew her name, owe her their thanks because she got it.

That is a life worth noting, and a path to follow.

Eleanor Joyce Toliver-Williams was 74 years old.

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

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The good, bad and bizarre from the world’s best travel media

Santa Barbara sunset

Santa Barbara at sunset | © Greg Gross

DON’T LET THE BEDBUGS BITE!
No, this is not a flashback to some distant period in travel history. From the grungiest hostel to the toniest five-star hotel, bedbugs can be an issue when you travel. The best way to escape the annoying little critters? Evade them!

I know vampires are all the rages these days on movies and television but these particular little bloodsuckers are utterly uncool.

They’re turning up in Michigan, Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, in Canada and Europe. They turn up in libraries and lawyers’ offices. They turn up in the Empire State Building.

And if you travel, there’s a chance the may turn up where you sleep at night.

“They” are bedbugs, and you won’t just find them in beds. That’s just the one place where they might be the most annoying. They’ve been on a comeback worldwide since the 1990s and (stop me if you’ve heard this before), they’re increasingly resistant to pesticides.

New York City has just about gone to DEFCON-5 on the little blood-sucking so-and-so’s, to the point of bringing in beagles to track them down.

Don’t believe me? Check out this video. I don’t make this stuff up!

And to think, all Snoopy had to contend with was the Red Baron.

(If you’re thinking about using this as an excuse to eschew travel and stay home, forget about it. If the Bedbug Brigade hasn’t reached your hometown already, there’s a good chance its en route.)

MSNBC and CBS Moneywatch have tips for how you can avoid or protect yourself form bedbug infestations when you travel. There’s even an anti-bedbug app for your iPhone, which you can find courtesy of the folks at Smarter Travel.

For most travelers, the key is avoidance, and there are ways to do that. Don’t let these miniature multi-legged Draculas spoil your travels!

And now, today’s Digest:

Among the other entertaining and useful items you’ll find this week on the BBC Fast:Track site is a video tutorial on how to bargain. Haggling, bartering, call it what you want, but in open-air markets and other shops around world, you’ll be doing a lot of it. These guys show you how to get merchants to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

from USA Today
Think you travel light? Consider what author, travel writer and profesional vagabond Rolf Potts is planning: 12 countries, 42 days, zero bags. That’s right. Nothing.

from the Los Angeles Times
And speaking of money, the LAT takes us through the yin and yang of travel expense, offering up two slide showss& mdash; one on the world’s least expensive cities and the other on the world’s most expensive cities. Just for fun, check out both, and see which listy has the most destinations that most intrigue you. You just might shock yourself.

AFRICA
from allAfrica.com
A Nigerian air carrier is trying to establish direct trans-Atlantic flights between that West African nation and South America.

AMERICAS
from BBC Travel
How to do Chicago — comedy, jazz, blues and how to make one perfect day in the Windy City. In conjunction with the folks at Lonely Planet.

from the New York Times
Next month, Mexico celebrates its hard-won independence from Spain. The NYT’s Johnathan Kandell takes you to three towns that played pivotal roles in that bloody struggle. Today, they are picturesque peaceful destinations for travelers.

ASIA
from CNN
The CNN peeps are trying out an Asia beta site that is packed with interesting pieces on nearly every part of the Orient. If Asia travel interests you, prepare to spend some time on this site.

EUROPE
from the New York Times
What makes a backpacking journey across Lahemma National Park in Estonia akin to trying to walk across the world’s largest sponge?

Juneteenth

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Sunrise at Galveston Bay, Texas. This is where the sun set on American slavery.
© Paul Wolf via Dreamstime.com

Is this America’s most misunderstood holiday?

Aunt Lillie is a special person in my life, even though we never met. June 19 also is a special day — and both for the same reason.

It has to do with one of the lesser-known American holidays.

Aunt Lillie (she actually pronounced it la-LEÉ) lived most of her days in Bay St. Louis, MS. She was the last member of my family to be a slave.

At the height of the Civil War in 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, abolishing slavery. But this only had force in those parts of the South the Union army controlled — which in 1862, wasn’t much.

Three years later, with the Confederacy crushed, a Union general named Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, TX and promptly laid down the law, which he read from a balcony to the local populace:

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

Until that moment, to people like my Aunt Lillie, the Emancipation Proclamation had been little more than words on a page. Now, Lincoln’s promise to America of “a new birth of freedom” had been made real. This order would be heard throughout the South, but Galveston heard it first.

The date was June 19, 1865.

Someone eventually compressed that into Juneteenth, and former slaves everywhere — including Bay St. Louis — came to accept it as the date that marked their liberation. Many would treat it as a second birthday.

For decades thereafter, ex-slaves and their free-born kin would trek to Galveston in a pilgrimage not unlike that of Muslims to Mecca. The celebrations could last a week.

They sang. They danced. They went to church. They staged rodeos and paid homage to legendary black cowboys like Bill Pickett. They traced their ancestral roots. And they cooked. Barbecues became a Juneteenth staple.

Another staple was red soda. Sounds bizarre, I know, but they had their reasons.

Back in the day, strawberry-flavored soda drinks were new, exotic, pricey — and off-limits to slaves. Then came Juneteenth — and BANG! Instant tradition. Now, on your day, you drank the red soda. Strawberry-flavored, cream soda-flavored, whatever flavor. It just had to be red.

Their descendants were still doing it a century later, as R&B singer Joe Tex noted in one of his songs, “Men Are Getting Scarce:”

“She reminds me of them folks
up in Navisoda, Texas,
eatin’ barbecue and drinkin’ red sody water
on the 19th of June!”

(These days, there’s a Texas soft drink called Big Red that sells a lot on Juneteenth. Some love it. Others have likened its taste to ice-cold Robitussin. Either way, it’s sold in 44 of the 50 U.S. states…and Tahiti. Don’t ask.)

With the black migration from the rural South to the industrial North and expanding West, Juneteenth fell into decline, but the Civil Rights movement revived it. And in 1980, Texas recognized it as an official state holiday.

Today, across the country and even internationally, black Americans mark Juneteenth in a variety of ways — some public, some private, some communal, some personal.

And it’s a big to-do in Galveston.

As for my Aunt Lillie, she lived to be 104. She died a few years before I was born. She saw whole generations live and die in bondage. But her own life, begun in slavery, ended as one long drink of freedom.

I try to imagine how her spirit must have soared every year around this time. I try to fathom the joy, the gratitude she must have felt. And I try to comprehend the glow in her soul at the moment she realized that maybe, just maybe, all things really were possible.

That is why, every year on Juneteenth, I feel a gaze that I never saw, feel a voice that I never heardhellip;and I rejoice.

Happy Birthday, Aunt Lillie.

Galveston today is a city of about 60,000 people, less than an hour’s drive south of Houston. It sits at one end of a barrier island of the same name in the Gulf of Mexico.

That island has about 32 miles of uninterrupted beach and shoreline.

The city itself sports a Schlitterbahn waterpark, several historic ships and is one of the major cruise ship ports on the Gulf. It also offers activities ranging from jazz festivals to surf and skate camps.

Some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had in my life — and definitely the hottest — was in Galveston.

Galveston is one of the few places on Earth, if not the only one, that has a museum based on an offshore oil rig.

Among the items on exhibit there is a blowout preventer that you can see for yourself, up close. Given this year’s BP oil spill, which eventually may threaten Galveston’s economic existence, the irony of that particular display is breathtaking.

If you’d like to join in this year’s Juneteenth festivities — or just enjoy Galveston before the oil tide gets there — you can find more detailed visitor information on this site.

Found: My Childhood Bridge

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PecosHighBridge

Pecos high Bridge. Photo by John West

Way back in the second entry I ever did for this blog, I described a trip I made as a child on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles, the trip that ignited my passion for traveling. On that trip, we made a predawn crossing of a bridge over a gorge that left this then 6-year-old utterly enthralled:

“We were crossing a canyon, a gorge, or maybe it was the place where all the bad little kids descended into Hell. Whatever it was, I couldn’t see the bottom. Nor could I see the railroad bridge that was bearing us over it. We seemed to be suspended in space, not rolling across the desert, but flying through the night. At first, I feared that gorge would never end. Soon, I hoped it wouldn’t.

That was the moment when the destination became secondary to the journey, the moment I became addicted to travel.”

In all those years, I’ve never known the name of that bridge, where it was, or anything about it. Until now. The Web solved what had been for me a 52-year mystery.

The bridge to my young imagination turns out to be a railroad bridge over the Pecos River in Texas. It’s call the Pecos High Bridge, and it has a history that goes back farther and deeper than I ever would’ve guessed.

And the Sunset Limited still crosses it.

Road t(r)ips

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Back in prehistoric times, when gas cost 35 cents a gallon, my family made these annual summer drives from Oakland, CA to Texas and Louisiana to visit our respective sides of the family. Certain things were guaranteed to happen:

St. Louis skyline as seen from inside the top of the Gateway Arch. Center, the old federal courthouse where the Dred Scott case was heard.

St. Louis skyline as seen from inside the top of the Gateway Arch. Center, the old federal courthouse where the Dred Scott case was heard.

* My stepfather would try to push his pink 1958 Buick, with its fat fins and plastic seat covers, from California to Texas in one day.

* We would eat in at least one “greasy spoon” diner in which grease would’ve improved the flavor.

* Between Los Angeles and Houston, the car radio would become a black hole of indecipherable Spanish and painfully twangy country music.

* My stepfather would drive 30 miles the wrong way before admitting that he had missed his turn. This usually happened somewhere in Klan country as night was falling.

Ah, the memories…

The 35-cent gas is long gone, but there are still families that hit the road for vacations, and not just in summer. Technology has swept away most of the old annoyances (including pink Buicks with fat fins and plastic seat covers). Throw in a little creativity, with a touch of caution, and you can have some great times seeing America.

BEFORE YOU GO
Get the car checked out thoroughly BEFORE you hit the highway.
Car engines almost never boil over in a convenient place. The need for good brakes is obvious. And a cross-country trip is no place to squeeze the last 500 miles out of your radials. “It seemed all right before we left” is the epitaph of too many road trips.

An ounce of prevention beats waiting half a day in the middle of nowhere for one of the Children of the Corn to show up in his tow truck.

In fact, consider renting a car, van or even an RV for your trip. For the cost of a cross-country airfare for one, you might be able to transport your whole family in comfort and style — and put all that wear and tear on somebody else’s wheels instead of yours.

Bring a cell phone and keep it charged.
Of course, if you have no way to call for help when you do break down, even the COTC tow trucker may have a hard time finding you. And be sure you’re a member of some sort of emergency roadside assistance program, in case you need that tow!

Settle any and all music issues in advance.
Thanks to the miracles of iPods, mp3 players and satellite radio, the days of suffering through insufferable sounds on long trips are a thing of the past.

If the whole family’s musical tastes are the same, that makes it easy: Spring for a satellite radio account. If not, make each person responsible for their own tunes. Portable DVD players are good for movies, too, provided there are no backseat tugs-of-war over it.

The car’s in-dash stereo belongs to the driver, period. He (or she) can’t plug in headphones to listen to their favorite tunes (and if you get caught doing that while driving, you can be cited for it).

Get the kids involved early
Let them help with route planning, even if you could already drive the route blindfolded. Go over maps together. Get them to identify points of interest along the way (more on this later). Get them to calculate driving times between points. Psst! You don’t have to let on that they’re actually learning things like math, geography and history while they do all this. Let that be your little secret!

ON THE ROAD
Build in some extra time each day. Take the pressure off yourself.
You’re not a Greyhound bus driver with a schedule to keep, so why drive like one? Take rest stops every few hours. Find a piece of shade and have a cold drink. You’ll end the day less tired and cranky.

Time your departures, breaks, arrivals so as not to hit in the middle of rush hour.
You may need to leave earlier or later than normal to get around and away from traffic nightmares, but it’s worth it. Bad enough sitting in traffic going to and from work; do you really want to do that on your vacation?

Besides, there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing you’re on the road when all those workday suckers out there are still in bed, and vice versa.

Turn your kids into wingmen
Getting your kids involved in the trip shouldn’t end with the planning. Make sure they stay involved in the trip itself.

Don’t give them chores. Give them missions.

At fuel stops, let them pump the gas, clean the windshields, check the tires. On the road, put them in charge of navigation, map reading. Have them calculate distances to the next gas, time to the town where you plan to stop for lunch, fuel consumption of your car. Let them plot alternate routes if there’s bad weather ahead.

Between their music and your missions, they’ll be too busy and too engaged to ask you “Are we there yet?” 9,000 times.

Keep it interesting, keep it fun
You’re on vacation, right? Be spontaneous. Take a detour that looks interesting or fun. Remember those points of interest you had the kids identify before the trip started? You can make it part of the day’s plan, or a surprise reward for good behavior.

Pick up the makings of a picnic lunch, then have your midday meal al fresco. Have some fun while you save on the food bill.

A cross-country highway trip doesn’t have to be an exercise in long-distance torture. With a little forethought and flexibility, it can be a good time and a learning experience that brings the whole family closer together.

Or you could go 40 straight hours listening to Conway Twitty and “Are we there yet?”

The choice is yours!