Family Travel Forum - Planning An American Road Trip Or RV Adventure

Whether your family is planning on driving to Utah, Rhode Island, Georgia, Colorado or anywhere else in the United States, these books will highlight something for everyone along the way. Specific camping guides for RV travelers add more useful information to the mix.

Let’s Go Roadtripping USA: The Complete Coast-to-Coast Guide to America (Let’s Go, $18.99, 2005)

This massive guide (over 1,000 pages long!) includes eight distinct roadtrips, including the East Coast, the Great North, the National Road, Route 66, the Oregon Trail, the North American (Mexico, the US, Canada and Alaska), the Southern Border and the Pacific Coast. Each of these pathways of Americana gives background information about the various stops along the road. Readers can look up information about the states and their prominent cities in sections on brief history, getting around, vital statistics, sights, entertainment, food, accommodations, nightlife and how to get back on the road. In addition to its eight detailed roadtrips, the guide includes 230 route and city maps, as well as a unique look at the history of the road, hints at car-trip essentials, and explanations of how to best use the guide.

Eccentric America, 2nd edition by Jan Friedman (Bradt Travel Guides, $13.57, 2004)

This book explores plenty of background on general American eccentricities in chapters including “Describing the Indescribable,” “America’s Peculiar Pastimes” and “The Eccentric Year.” Building on this background, it then provides a pathway to discover oddities all over the country. It divides “the eccentric states” into six regions and offers details about a variety of “Eccentric Environments,” the “Just Plain Weird,” museums and collections, attractions, cities and towns, grandiose schemes, tours, shopping, quirky cuisine and quarters, entertainment, maps, and travel information within every state. If you want to know about the “Gator Cook-Off” in Orlando, or a one-room cottage made of bottles in Hillsville, Virginia, among over 300 pages of crazy and zany American habits, traditions, and well-kept secrets, then this is the book for you. As hard as it might be to track down all of these locations, this guide provides names, telephone numbers, addresses, and any existing Web sites and email addresses, in addition to recommending the best times to visit. Maps of all 50 states with symbols depicting each state's own oddities, as well as one map of the whole country showing the number of featured sites per state are useful in planning the details of journeys through “Eccentric America.” Make sure this guide stays in your car.

Watch It Made in the U.S.A.: A Visitor's Guide to the Best Factory Tours and Company Museums, 4th edition by Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg (Avalon Travel Publishing, $15.00, 2006)

No family road trip would be complete without a stop at a factory tour, that fast-dying breed of entertainment that kept an older generation happily in the backseat. With this guidebook, the kids can help you plot out stops and snacks at candy or crayon factories, or humorous food manufacturers like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or Kellogg’s Cereals. You can learn about production of a variety of goods from motorcycles to computer parts. The original "Watch It Made in the U.S.A." paperback guide has been updated to stay current with ever-changing union regulations and safety laws, issues that forced the closing of most of the country’s auto manufacturing facilities. Authors Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg introduce more than 300 ordinary and extraordinary products, and show how to make learning about them fun.

Along Interstate 75 by Dave Hunter (Mile Oak Publishing, $21.95, 2006)

Readers from the Midwest will certainly be familiar with I-75, the multilane highway that courses from Michigan (and Ontario, Canada) south to Florida. But no one knows it as well as Dave Hunter, whose sturdy, spiral-bound paperback boasts local knowledge, insider information, common sense (and a sense of humor) that’s useful for every traveler of any age. Well drawn, not overly-detailed maps feature 25 miles to the page, with special sights, favorite radio stations, exit restaurants with play areas, RV and pet-welcoming facilities and hotels, tips on speed traps and road signs noted. finally your road trip goes by quickly while having fun. And your little backseat drivers will be way too busy following the map’s notes to points of interest: “Two hundred years ago you would be in the heart of Indian country... the Shawnee were the most fierce of the Ohio tribes;” “If you are planning to ride the TN Valley Railroad, few know you can ride up front in the cab with the engineer;” or even “Mile 471-Florida Welcome Center - don’t forget to stop here for your free orange or grapefruit juice;” to ever dare ask, “Are we there yet?”

Drive I-95 by Sandra Phillips-Posher and Stan Posher (Travelsmart, $15.61, 2005)

This 216-page format has been used efficiently and clearly for another highway guide, this time to the East Coast snowbirds’ favorite route: I95. If you consider the number of families and seniors commuting between New England and the coast of Florida throughout the winter months, you can see why there’s a need for a fun, comprehensive guide to what is otherwise a dull, eight-lane highway. Unfortunately, the frequent commuters who reviewed the guide were disappointed by its lack of imagination. Not being interested in the next fast food outlet or cheap motel, they found its paucity of “off-road” attractions, local restaurants or diners and alternate lodging such as B&Bs diminished its usefulness.

2006 Trailer Life Directory: Campgrounds, RV Parks, and Services by TL Enterprises (Trailer Life Books, $24.95, 2005)

Written for those with RVs and large trailers, this directory lists more than 16,000 campground descriptions. Private campgrounds are personally inspected by Trailer Life teams. Included are listings for handicapped-accessible and Internet-served campgrounds, state park ratings, free dump station locations and much more. This guide is easy to use and well laid out for the navigator’s use. Full-color state maps highlight over 10,000 cities and towns with RV park locations.

Historical Sites Along the Route of Your Road Trip

According to a recent study by the TIA, 80% of US adults who traveled in 2006 included historic or cultural activities in their trips. We know that history lovers want to share their passion with their kids, and that more of you may be motivated to go the road trip route with backseat fidgeters if the destination is both delightful and historic. That's why we're so pleased with the online mapping program developed by the 50-year-old National Trust for Historic Preservation. In a cure for its midlife crisis, the Trust has decided that historic sites are ready to leap off the bookshelves and onto the Internet, where families can find them by simply inserting a zip code.

We went to the site, Preservation Atlas (www.preservationatlas.org), and chose to plan our trip by looking for a "Dozen Distinctive Destinations." There were so many (far beyond a Baker's Dozen stretch the breadth and height of the USA) that we picked one of our favorite zip codes 90210 to refine the search. Voila! We landed in Beverly Hills looking for historical significance (!) and quickly discovered that our family was also near the following wonderful sites (numbers from map): 1. The Egyptian Theatre, a true classic of Hollywood's Golden Age, open for tours. 2. The Art Deco Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, right across from the oceanview esplanade. 3. Bullocks Wilshire Building, a Deco classic department store. 4. Millennium Biltmore Hotel, an early Deco masterpiece in downtown LA that's a short walk from the new classic Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry, an edifice likely to be found on this site in another 50 years. Give this site a try; it's not so easy to use but the results are great. Your family can play with it to search a database of the thousands of National Trust offerings, including America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, the fascinating collection of Historic Hotels of America, hundreds of historic sites and the up-and-coming attractions that will use preservation grants for restoration. And we guarantee you will all learn something together.

FTF Editors

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