Back Seat Driver

One of our dear readers (Dennis B. Petersen of faraway Denmark) posted a comment the other day pointing me to another funny road trip website. This one is fully animated, composed of some 12,000 snapshots taken from the back seat of a car as it is driven from Portland Oregon to somewhere in New Hampshire, back in June 2003. Pictures were snapped every 10 seconds for 5 days, and the whole viewing experience takes less than 10 minutes. Food and rest stops have been left in, but the overnights in motel parking spaces have been kindly edited out.

Alas, the route follows Interstate Highways most of the way, and so the movie vividly documents what the late great Charles Kuralt once said -- that Interstates let you drive all the way across the country without seeing anything -- but it's still captivating. (And a good lesson about how "blue highway" road trips are superior to the fast-lane long-haul!)