The family road trip then and now
From iPhones to air conditioning, hitting the road has changed since the Griswolds headed to Walley World decades ago
It’s been more than 30 years since movie patriarch Clark Griswold, he of the ever-cursed family holidays, packed his wife and kids into the Wagon Queen Family Truckster and embarked on his ill-fated drive from Chicago to California for a summer vacation at Walley World. (Spoiler alert: It was closed.)
Back then, the fictional family of National Lampoon’s Vacation was acting out the scene that so many real families across the United States and Canada did, and continue to do, each summer: pack up the car and head to a destination unreasonably far from home.
In those days — the film was released in the summer of 1983 — neither seatbelts nor air conditioning were standard features in cars, and for a larger family of two parents, three kids and perhaps a dog, that set the stage for some Lord of the Flies- calibre moments.
When Clark meets Roy Walley, the Walt-Disney-like proprietor of Walley World near the end of the film, he explains that he just wanted to give his family a fun-filled summer vacation. Walley nods in understanding, having once driven his family to Florida.
“The worst two weeks I ever had in my life,” he says solemnly. “The smell from the back seat was terrible.”
Aids to surviving a days-long car trip were few in 1983.
If reading made you carsick, woe to the teenager who forgot to pack enough batteries for the Sony Walkman, not to mention mixed tapes that no doubt included plenty of Duran Duran, Prince and, if the kids had any sense, Stevie Nicks.
Automotive writer Mark Toljagic has driven south with his wife and three daughters every March Break for the past decade.
He remembers only one road trip from his own youth, back in 1976, when his dad packed the family into their Mercury Meteor, “a big, honking car,” as Toljagic remembers, and headed west.
Toljagic and his brother spent hours reading and playing magnetic chess, “but the days passed pretty slowly,” he says.
“We’d count the cars that we’d see broken down on the side of the road,” Toljagic says.
Whether 30 years ago or today, it seems unlikely that any family except the Griswolds would survive getting stranded in the desert, end up driving in the rain with Aunt Edna, who died “somewhere near Flagstaff,” strapped to the roof, or forget to do something as simple as check whether Walley World was open before hitting the road. (They may not have had the Internet back then, but rotary telephones had long since taken the nation by storm.)
Kids on road trips today are more likely to spend the time with their noses in their iPhones playing Candy Crush or WhatsApp-ing their friends, watching a movie on an iPad, stretching out across their own row of seating in the minivan and otherwise ignoring the rest of his family.
Drivers today can choose from among an array of climate-controlled vehicles for their family adventure, from minivans to crossovers to SUVs, can enjoy a safer drive thanks to airbags, ABS brakes and alarms that ring when the car is in danger of drifting into the next lane, and never know the fear, or fun, of getting lost thanks to GPS, all features that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
But one thing that has remained the same over time is the unique experience that driving from one point to another offers, something that flying cannot.
It’s the chance to drive through nature, visit different landmarks and meet countless people along the way.
As Clark Griswold says when his kids ask why they aren’t flying to Walley World: “Because getting there is half the fun.”