Southern Sass: A Love Letter to an American Rite of Passage

5.31.2019

A Love Letter to an American Rite of Passage

There's just something about squawking along to "Tiny Dancer" while you skid along Route 66 and the sun sets over the desert of Nowhere, West Texas. There's something about sweating through th

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National

May 31, 2019

Why You Should Make Your Summer Vacation a Classic Summer Road Trip
A Love Letter to an American Rite of Passage

There's just something about squawking along to "Tiny Dancer" while you skid along Route 66 and the sun sets over the desert of Nowhere, West Texas. There's something about sweating through the white t-shirt you've been wearing for the last four days straight, because you're air guitaring too hard to "Born to be Wild" on your muggy descent to Key West. There's something about coincidentally being on Ventura Boulevard when Tom Petty sings about all those vampires moving down Ventura Boulevard. There's something about the newspapery smell of the pavement, the metronomic thud of the wind whipping through the windows, something about the leaving, the going, the rapidly expanding terrain of the unknown. It makes you feel cool. Like, bad to the bone cool.

Since Jack Kerouac and his beatnik compatriots burned down the American highways in the 1950s and inculcated our culture with the fantasy of freeway freedom, the cross-country road trip has established itself as a romantic rite of passage for American youth, promising roadside dives, spliffs, gin-soaked love affairs, watery diner coffee and cowboy grifters who bear a resemblance to a young Brad Pitt...