We left before sunrise.
That’s the part I remember first—being carried to the car still half-asleep, the particular smell of early morning and coffee from my father’s thermos, the back seat arranged into something like a nest with blankets and pillows that would have horrified a safety inspector.
My sister and I would sleep for the first hour and wake up somewhere already unfamiliar, the landscape changed, the day already underway.
There was no itinerary, exactly. There were destinations, loosely held. There were stops that weren’t planned—a roadside stand that looked interesting, a lake someone spotted from the highway, a town they’d heard about once and decided to try. The trip was the point, not just the arrival.
I didn’t understand until much later what was actually happening in those cars. What my parents were giving us without naming it—not just the trips themselves, but the particular texture of unstructured time, of problems solved without a device, of being bored and having to figure out what to do with the boredom. Of being trusted to be passengers in something that didn’t have a script.
That kind of road trip doesn’t exist anymore. The screens arrived. The GPS arrived. The pressure to document and optimize and arrive efficiently arrived. And with it, something quietly disappeared.
If your parents did these things, you got something without realizing it.
1. They drove without GPS and figured it out as they went
The map was physical, often wrong, sometimes missing entirely. They stopped at gas stations to ask directions from strangers. They made wrong turns and turned the wrong turns into detours and occasionally the detours were the best part.
The children in the back seat watched this. Watched adults encounter a problem they hadn’t anticipated and work through it in real time—with humor, or frustration, or the particular competence of people who’d been navigating the world for decades without anyone handing them the answer on a screen.
What got absorbed was the idea that not knowing where you were wasn’t a crisis. It was just a situation. And situations were navigable.
2. They let the kids be bored without offering them entertainment
There was nothing to do. That was the whole situation. Miles of highway and hours of time and no device that would fill it and no parent whose job it was to make it interesting.
So you invented things. License plate games that got increasingly elaborate. Stories that accumulated across state lines. Internal worlds that required nothing but time and the particular restlessness of a child with nowhere to be and nothing to do but figure out what to do with themselves.
The boredom was the gift, even though it didn’t feel like one. The capacity to generate your own experience from nothing—to not need external input in order to be okay—got built in exactly those long, quiet, unoccupied stretches.
3. They stopped whenever something looked interesting
Not because it was on the itinerary. Because someone saw something from the window and said what’s that and they pulled over to find out.
The world’s largest something. A historical marker that took twelve minutes to read and was completely worth it. A diner that looked promising. A state park that wasn’t the destination but became the memory.
The lesson, absorbed without anyone stating it, was that the detour is often the point. That the thing you didn’t plan for is frequently more interesting than the thing you did. That a schedule is a suggestion and curiosity is a better guide.
4. They had real conversations because there was nothing else to do
No one was looking at a phone. The radio had limited range and would drift into static and get abandoned. The car was a sealed container with its occupants and whatever they brought to the hours inside it.
Conversations happened that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Things got said that required the particular privacy of a moving car—the forward-facing arrangement, the road as a neutral third party, the miles making it easier to get to the real thing. Parents revealed things. Kids asked questions they wouldn’t have asked at the dinner table.
I remember conversations from those car trips that I’ve never had again in quite the same way. Something about the road made honesty easier. I didn’t know to save those conversations. I only understand now what they were.
5. They didn’t solve every discomfort for the kids
The car was too hot for a stretch. The drive was longer than anyone wanted. Someone was carsick, or hungry, or in a mood, or in a fight with a sibling that resolved itself somewhere around the state line without adult intervention.
They didn’t rush to fix it. They acknowledged it and kept driving and trusted that the children would find their way through it, which the children did, because children are more capable of enduring discomfort than adults usually let them demonstrate.
What got built was a specific kind of resilience—the understanding that being uncomfortable is survivable, that discomfort passes, that you don’t need to be rescued from every hard moment.
6. They let the radio be shared territory
Everyone got a turn. Or no one got a turn and it was a negotiation. Or it landed on a station no one would have chosen individually and somehow that became the soundtrack of the whole trip.
The shared experience of music in a car—the songs that got stuck in everyone’s head simultaneously, the ones that got sung along to with varying degrees of accuracy, the ones that became associated with a specific stretch of highway and still carry that association decades later—was its own kind of intimacy.
Music as communal experience rather than individual playlist. It sounds small. It wasn’t.
7. They modeled how to be lost without panicking
The wrong exit. The town that looked different from how it was described. The campground that turned out to be full, requiring a real-time pivot to an alternative no one had researched.
They handled it. Not always gracefully, not always without some audible frustration, but without catastrophizing. The children watched them encounter the unexpected and navigate it—watched the problem-solving happen in real time, watched the adults demonstrate that being lost was a temporary condition rather than a permanent disaster.
That is a thing worth watching. More useful than any map.
8. They were fully present in a way that’s hard to replicate now
Not because they were trying to be. Because there was nothing competing for their attention. No device pinging. No email arriving. No parallel engagement pulling them half out of the car and into somewhere else.
They were just there. In the car. With the kids and the road and whatever the day brought. And the kids felt it—felt the quality of being with parents who were actually there, not physically present while mentally elsewhere.
I think about this when I catch myself reaching for my phone in a moment that doesn’t require it. The presence my parents had in those cars wasn’t a virtue. It was just what was available. And it was enough.
9. They brought food from home and made it part of the ritual
The cooler packed the night before. The sandwiches that tasted better than they had any right to. The snacks portioned out with the particular ceremony of things that had to last. The stop at a roadside stand for something local that became the taste associated with that trip, that summer, that version of everyone before everything changed.
Food as occasion. As shared experience. As the marker of a particular stretch of road or a particular hour of afternoon. It required nothing except that someone had thought ahead and packed it, and someone else received it and ate it and remembered it.
10. They gave everyone permission to just be for a while
Not to perform. Not to produce. Not to arrive somewhere having optimized the journey into content or data or a curated set of memories suitable for sharing.
Just to be in the car. To watch the landscape change. To think, or not think, or sleep, or argue, or sing along to something stupid, or stare out the window at the country going by and feel, in some inarticulate way, the particular luck of being alive and in motion with the people you belong to.
That permission—to simply exist inside an experience without extracting value from it—is one of the rarer gifts a childhood can contain. And it arrived, for a lot of people, somewhere on a highway between somewhere and somewhere else, before anyone knew to call it anything.
