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    Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
    Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
    Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
    Audiobook8 hours

    Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip

    Written by Richard Ratay

    Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross

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    About this audiobook

    “A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” (Kirkus Reviews), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips—before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps.

    The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming—sans seatbelts!—to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

    Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative” (New York Newsday) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day” (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio.

    An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips” (Publishers Weekly), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJul 3, 2018
    ISBN9781508261322
    Author

    Richard Ratay

    Richard Ratay was the last of four kids raised by two mostly attentive parents in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in journalism and has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for twenty-five years. Ratay lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, with his wife, Terri, their two sons, and two very excitable rescue dogs.

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    Reviews for Don't Make Me Pull Over!

    4/5

    45 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Interesting funny informative and just plain good listen I can relate to it mostly
    • 5/5
      Excellent book. A mix of personal memoir and sociological study that was a pleasure to read.
    • 5/5
      A nice solid listen. It’s about 70s Americana as much as it is about travel.
    • 4/5
      This is a fun read about the history of the great American road trip vacation as those of us who experienced it remember from the 1960;s and 1970's. Richard Ratay chronicles the history of the American road trip from the building of highways to roadside attractions to old time road maps and car travel games to the development of chain hotels and safety devices for automobiles. This is another quick and fun read for the summer.
    • 4/5
      This is an entertaining (and very informative account) of what it was like to take family road trips in the sixties and seventies, and it brought back vivid memories of my own family road trips with my parents and brothers that we took throughout the decade of the 1960s. It was certainly a different world in those days, and "Don't Make Me Pull Over!" captured exactly what it was like to be crammed inside a car for a week or so while so many new places flashed by outside the car's closed windows.The book is also a nicely written, concise history of the way that mass transportation changed over the decades, and how those changes were so directly linked to the price of gasoline, the emergence of motels and fast food sellers, and, finally, the deregulation of the airline industry (a move that crippled road trips while making flying affordable to the middle class for the first time ever.
    • 4/5
       Don't Make Me Pull Over is a sort of memoir, a sort of history of cars and America.
    • 4/5
      While there certainly is some great nostalgia to be found in Richard Ratay's Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, overall this was something of a disappointment for me. Ratay's accounts of his 1970's childhood road trips with his family are warm and funny, but those stories are far outnumbered by the tangential popular history elements of the book, such as the history of roads, highways, cars, CB radio, fast food restaurants, motel chains, etc. Although breezy and engaging throughout, I would have preferred more tales of the family road trip, and a bit less history.