Summertime means vacations, and that can mean road trips!!
I loooove to road trip – toss all kinds of stuff in the car and just go places. Five gallon container of water, tent, tons of snacks (the kinds that don’t melt or spoil are the best!), a GPS and an atlas – and you are ready to go! Ideally, you can stop off at every single brown highway sign to see the sights. (Brown signs are for recreation and cultural interest.)
You can pick out some standard drives, or head for a specific destination. We are really lucky here in Minnesota to have so many great Scenic Byways: “a road corridor that has regionally outstanding scenic, natural, recreational, cultural, historic or archaeological significance. These corridors offer an alternative travel route to our major highways and daily travel patterns, while telling a story about Minnesota’s heritage, recreational activities or beauty. ”
If you love to road trip, or if you have always wanted to do one, check out the books below! And if you are more of an armchair traveler, here are the books that will let you enjoy adventures from the comfort of your home.
You can use this flyer o help you build your own display! Road trip books
(We are linking to Amazon in the book images below; if you click thru it in theory we get a small piece of Amazon’s profits. In practice, it rarely works – so just enjoy the information either way!)
The Longest Road, by Philip Caputo
I listened to this on a road trip with my dad, as we drove the entire length of Alaska. We have also driven in a long road trip from Illinois to Key West, so this book really resonated with us!! (I think Caputo could have been nicer to his wife sometimes; but travel does not always bring out out best behavior!)
Caputo, his wife, and their two English setters made their way in a truck and classic trailer (hereafter known as “Fred” and “Ethel”) from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, covering sixteen thousand miles. He spoke to everyone from a West Virginia couple saving souls to a Native American shaman and taco entrepreneur. What he found is a story that will entertain and inspire readers as much as it informs them about the state of today’s United States, the glue that holds us all together, and the conflicts that could pull us apart.”
I read this road trip to hear about the visit to National Parks – always the BEST travel destinations!! (I’m on a quest to visit all the state parks in Minnesota, and we are so lucky to have such great parks!!) This book is emotional, but does not dwell in the sadness – like any good road trip it keeps moving forward and does not get bogged down in the details. Good story!
“August Shroeder, a burned-out teacher, has been sober since his nineteen-year-old son died. Every year he’s spent the summer on the road, but making it to Yellowstone this year means everything. The plan had been to travel there with his son, but now August is making the trip with Philip’s ashes instead. An unexpected twist of fate lands August with two extra passengers for his journey, two half-orphans with nowhere else to go.
What none of them could have known was how transformative both the trip—and the bonds that develop between them—would prove, driving each to create a new destiny together. ”
I stumbled into the book, and was living in Chicago at the time, so the location grabbed me. But then I wanted to keep reading it for the adventure of the road trip! A good YA, for actual YAs or adults who enjoy a nice trip.
“Meet Jenna Boller, star employee at Gladstone Shoe Store in Chicago. Standing a gawky 5’11” at 16 years old, Jenna is the kind of girl most likely to stand out in the crowd for all the wrong reasons. But that doesn’t stop Madeline Gladstone, the president of Gladstone’s Shoes 176 outlets in 37 states, from hiring Jenna to drive her cross country in a last ditch effort to stop Elden Gladstone from taking over his mother’s company and turning a quality business into a shop-and-schlock empire. Now Jenna Boller shoe salesperson is about to become a shoe-store spy as she joins her crusty old employer for an eye-opening adventure that will teach them both the rules of the road and the rules of life.”
“William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about “those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi.”
His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.”
A few summers ago, I drove the entire Lewis and Clark Trail, visiting every public library along the way. It was an amazing adventure!! And I clutched my copy of this book, and several other great Lewis and Clark books, to make sure I could maximize my adventuring. (Note: it totally worked. I had a fantastic time!)
“One hundred and eighty years after Lewis and Clark’s “Voyage of Discovery” (1804–1806), Dayton Duncan set out in a Volkswagen camper to retrace their steps. Out West is an account of three separate journeys: Lewis and Clark’s epic adventure through uncharted wilderness; Duncan’s retracing of the historic trail, now in various ways tamed, paved, and settled; and the journey of the American West in the years in between. Readers traveling with Duncan will encounter the people who inhabit today’s West: farmers and ranchers, cowboys and mountain men, Native Americans, residents of dying small towns, city dwellers who have survived cycles of boom and bust. From the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Oregon coast, readers will be treated to a landscape as variously impressive as its people.”
This was a really interesting road trip book, with a lot of letters to friends included and other material that contributed to the text. Starting off the motorcycle trip with an amazing amount of sorrow, having lost his daughter and his wife in just a few short months, the story covers a few years and talks about the adventures he had driving from Canada, to the United States, to Mexico, and back.
“This bold narrative written by the drummer and lyricist for the band Rush shows how Peart tried to stay alive by staying on the move after the loss of his 19-year-old daughter and his wife. ”
You can enjoy this very popular story in book format, or check out the movie! Green is a very popular YA author, with many other interesting books after this road trip adventure!
“When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.”
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