What happened to road trips?

Lack of $ and consecutive vacation time.

Regret that we didn't have enough of either to do this more when our kids were younger. But life is what it is.

Took a great week this year with our 4 almost adult kids and toured St. Louis and surrounding areas. But dang, $4000 for food and lodging. Not easy with medical bills, car repairs, and college expenses. And then we all have jobs and have to synchronize time off.

Most hotels on road trips are about $100 a night.
 
I would love to do more road trips, but unfortunately I don't have enough vacation time, to do them. If I want to spend any time at a destination, we have to fly.

This exactly. I had a lot of fun as a kid/young adult driving to Disney World, but since I only get 10 vacation days a year I don't want to waste two days of a trip driving.
 


Time involved is a huge factor since we only get so many vacation days. And when we vacation, we want to get to the vacation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Plus, factoring in the price of gas, stopping to eat/stay, and just time in general, it's often way cheaper for us to fly.

And coming home from vacation? Ugh I just want to be home already. I'm already sad vacation is over, I don't need a 10+ hour car ride on top of it.

As in road tripping as the actual vacation, that would be different. Camping is fun for a long weekend or so. And I'm glad to see that so many people enjoy it, but it's just not on my list of ways to spend my time off from work!
 
Growing up in the 80s, I went on road trips a lot with my parents. My friends also went on these trips.

Now, I don’t know anyone that road trips anymore. They fly everywhere and complain about how much it costs.
Just curious, what are you rambling mad about?
 


We’ve done road trips but probably never again. While we have 50/50 custody, it’s in a bizarre 48, 48, 72 hours a week and flips the next week. Dh and the mother of his kids each get 2 non consecutive week long vacations during summer. Fall and spring break switches. If we want to go to California for instance, we’d get there and have to immediately turn around. I think that’s true for a lot more families now.
 
Well, I really am not a huge fan of road trips. I have had severe motion sickness (cars/busses in particular) and used to throw up as a small child on even very short rides. So, once we figured out the issue, I was also given Dramamine (not a non drowsy version in the early 1970s) for vacations.

I still get motion sick even when medicated. Long car rides are torture.

I can drive and not get sick, but it is not my idea of vacation.
 
We've been road trippers since our son was born. We HATE flying, we prefer to take our time and not be on a schedule, we really do need a lot of "stuff" for our little one, and when we added up the cost of round-trip airfare and a week's rental car w/car seat as opposed to gas/food/hotels, we actually found it to be cheaper to drive. Since our son was 18 months old, we've driven from CT to Clearwater, Florida three times (and we're already planning next year's trip), plus a trip to Illinois and Wisconsin, and a day trip to Maine. Since we started so young, he's a wonderful traveler. He enjoys learning about the different states he's in and he LOVES hotels. We signed up for hotel rewards and we pre-book, so I don't think we've paid more than $75/night at a hotel (we're good with Best Westerns, Comfort Inns, etc.). We bring some food with us, so we have breakfast and dinner in our hotel room - plus there's a Target right behind our preferred hotel in South Carolina, so we bring what we need for one day, then run in there when we arrive on the second day. For lunch, family members usually give us gift cards, so we can stop for something quick while we're on the road. Also while we're driving, sometimes we see something we didn't know about and we have the luxury of stopping to explore. It's really a lot of fun for us!
 
Growing up in the 80s, I went on road trips a lot with my parents. My friends also went on these trips.

Now, I don’t know anyone that road trips anymore. They fly everywhere and complain about how much it costs.

Most people do not have the vacation time that past generations had. And they can't as easily take 3 weeks off for a true long distance roadie like families could when they had one income. It's much harder to coordinate time off and the like these days. And for a true good long distance roadie, rather than just drive till you drop on the Interstate, you probably need about 3 weeks. That's not to mention that many of the attractions people had to do on the way aren't there any more. The interstates bypassed them. If one is blessed to live in California with Coast, mountains, beaches, more mountains, deserts, national parks galore, Disneyland, well you can go on roadies all the time and never even leave your state. But not so much in many other states.
 
We did quite a bit of road tripping when we camped. As the family navigator I'd pick a road generally the smallest I could find and away we would go. On one trip the weather was rainy where the campsite was located and would be for days so we picked a direction within the state that was solely based on the weather forecast. Discovered a part of CT we probably would have never gone to otherwise with working farms and horses running in pastures.

The man doesn't feel comfortable driving anymore and I don't know how to so we .travel via train whenever possible. Flying used to be fun but now especially domestic air travel is like being in a flying Greyhound bus to my way of thinking.
 
Most people do not have the vacation time that past generations had. And they can't as easily take 3 weeks off for a true long distance roadie like families could when they had one income. It's much harder to coordinate time off and the like these days. And for a true good long distance roadie, rather than just drive till you drop on the Interstate, you probably need about 3 weeks. That's not to mention that many of the attractions people had to do on the way aren't there any more. The interstates bypassed them. If one is blessed to live in California with Coast, mountains, beaches, more mountains, deserts, national parks galore, Disneyland, well you can go on roadies all the time and never even leave your state. But not so much in many other states.

I never went on a road trip for more than a week at a time. I think, it’s the state of mind these days about what a vacation has to be.
 
My older DD and her friends road trip all the time.

I haven’t been on a plane in over a decade. (not for any particular reason other than we went from a family of three to a family of five $$$) When we vacation we drive to our destination. Road Trips were not and will never be my thing. I HATE being on the road. Buying an RV in retirement and driving across the country would be my worst nightmare.

I was a child of the 80s and we never road tripped. Driven to destinations, yes. My dad didn’t get paid vacations let alone vacation time. Going on an actual vacation was far and few between.
 
I grew up going on YMCA Caravans, and then road trips in college. My wife and I did road trips with our kids too, but now we have an RV and if you don't plan things out you can get stuck. Last minute hotels can kill your budget, so life just seems to require more planning now.
 
I never went on a road trip for more than a week at a time. I think, it’s the state of mind these days about what a vacation has to be.

Well you're either not driving all that far or you're not stopping to see things on the way like the grand ole road trips of old.
 
I'm in the same boat as a lot of other people. We used to take road trips as a kid, but often our vacations were 2 weeks in the summer, and Dad still had time to take off at other times of the year too. Now, even if we have the "days" it's difficult to take so much off in succession.

We have done several 'road trip style" trips. One year, we flew to Las Vegas then "road tripped" to the Grand Canyon NP, Bryce canyon NP, and Zion NP. Another year, we flew to Salt Lake City, and did Grand Teton NP, Yellowstone, Glacier and Waterton Lakes NP in Alberta, Canada. We put almost 3000 miles on the rental car that week. I like road trips, but just would not have been possible if we added in driving from Ohio.
 

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