Corn, cattle, silos and cell towers – traveling in America

I remember road trips with my family when I was a youngster in the 1950s. We visited places in upstate NY in the summer like the Catskills, Niagara Falls and Fort Ticonderoga. We toured the Amish areas of Pennsylvania and the historic regions in and around Washington, D.C. In the winter, we drove to Miami Beach, FL to stay with my Aunt Irene and Uncle Lou, who had moved to Florida in the 1940s. These trips predate the Interstate highway system, FM radio, in-car tape players and GPS. We used large folding maps and TripTiks® from AAA to navigate.

We traveled in the family sedan. My father drove, my mother navigated, and my sisters and I fought over who would get stuck in the middle back seat. My father had no sense of direction. My mother had no sense of how to direct. She would yell, without warning, as we entered an intersection, “Turn here! Turn here!” not saying left or right. Invariably my father went the wrong way. Fifty miles of parental bickering ensued.

The cars were large and powerful. They didn’t have any of today’s safety features, no padded dashboards, no air bags, no seat belts. My father smoked. I remember driving around breathing in his second-hand smoke. There were no cup holders.

Entertainment was minimal. The car radio played local AM stations. I remember listening to songs from Your Hit Parade. My sisters and I entertained ourselves by staring at the scenery, playing geography and other car games. We stopped along the way at local eateries, motels and boarding houses. (Today these are known as B&Bs.) Large, garish signs along the road told us what was coming up. These were family adventures of exploration.

My wife and I recently drove our daughter to Roanoke College in Salem, VA, where she is a freshman. Salem is about 525 miles from Weston, CT. The route goes through seven states. Once one leaves the greater New York metropolitan area the countryside is primarily rural, farm after farm. So the sights along the way are fields of corn, cattle, horses, barns, silos and, surprisingly, cell towers. It seemed like every other farm had a cell tower situated on it. This made for great cell reception the entire trip.

I took my netbook computer along but never turned it on. A Garmin nüvi GPS and my iPhone were all we needed for the trip. The GPS told us what was coming up, how far away it was and when we would expect to arrive. My daughter would program it to find stops like Dunkin Donuts. We used my iPhone as an entertainment device during the trip. I plugged in the iPhone to the minivan’s D/C charger using a car-charger-to-USB adapter to keep it charged. I used an iPhone FM transmitter device to connect it to the car’s radio. (I could also have plugged the headphone jack into the radio’s AUX input.) We listened to my Pandora stations most of the way there and back. As I said, we had great cell phone coverage. My daughter used her BlackBerry to text her friends so she was occupied most of the trip. I was able to stay in touch using my iPhone for email, texting and calls.

It is fascinating to see how technology changed our lives in about a half century. Cell towers are now an everyday sight on a modern farm. Today we travel long distances on limited-access Interstate highways. What might have been a two day road trip in 1955 is a 10 hour superhighway trip in 2010. We have in-vehicle cup holders. The AM radio is replaced by streaming audio from the Internet via a cellphone. And the GPS replaces my mother yelling, “Turn here! Turn here!” The worst it says is, “Recalculating.”