"I'm headin' down the Atlanta highway, lookin' for the love getaway." These lyrics to the B-52s' "Love Shack" inspired a lengthy list modestly titled "Some Road Songs." Planning to make a road song mix tape? This is the motherlode. Surprisingly (or not?), the list is hosted on the Federal Highway Administration website. Browsing around the site, you'll also find information on the history of the Interstate System, articles from Public Roads magazine, and a selection of "Back in Time" articles about highway history by Rickie Longfellow. [more inside]
posted by litlnemo on Jul 6, 2010 - 43 comments

The Ford Treasury of Station Wagon Living blogged. (Vol 2). Downloadable at the Internet Archive. Scans of drawings here. [more inside]
posted by dersins on Aug 7, 2009 - 29 comments

Roadside Architecture. "I have been passionate about commercial architecture and roadside related things all my life. I grew up in California but New York City has been my home since 1980. I started this website in 2000 simply as a way to organize my own photos. Since then, it has become a bit of an obsession and grown to well over 1,000 pages." flickr. blog. [more inside]
posted by mwhybark on Apr 14, 2009 - 11 comments

Kerouac's On The Road: The 50th Anniversary Of A Book I Had Not Read I can't be the only one whose impression of the book, from hearing about it but not actually reading it, was that it was about young, potent men, lost in a growing commercial society, two coiled springs ready to pop, looking for adventure-- America style. And this Road Trip that launched a thousand, other boring, useless road trips, was about young men looking to experience the world, really see, really live, really feel, free of the constraints of an artificial post war soulless society . . . That impression is wrong. You know what the book is really about? It's a primer on how to be a narcissist.
posted by jason's_planet on Oct 18, 2007 - 136 comments

Christie Blatchford 's 9/11 road trip: From Montana to New York on a first anniversary odyssey "to audit America."
posted by timeistight on Sep 4, 2002 - 12 comments

In 1937, Nebraskan Joycolyn Knapp took a road trip with her family; in 2000, her grandson put her trip journal on the web. In addition to a mileage log and a list of expenditures (229 gallons of gas: $40.02), the journal contains dozens of photos of Depression-era America, including Yellowstone, New Orleans, and San Francisco. The postcards Grandma Knapp chose to save and the things she chose to document are wonderful both in themselves and for their portrayal of the American road trip before the birth of the interstate highway system. (via Portage)
posted by snarkout on Aug 5, 2002 - 8 comments