Road Trip USA in the News

In the years since I finished the first edition of Road Trip USA, the world has in many ways changed beyond imagination. Back in 1996, with my new book in hand, I traveled all over the country, visiting bookstores, shamelessly accosting newspaper editors and radio producers, and basically doing whatever it took to try to get some attention for my newborn mega magnum opus.

Thanks to an technophile publisher, in the early 1990s, before the book first came out, we also managed to create a community of road trip aficianados in the then-brave new world of “Gopherspace” and hyper-links, which has since evolved into the cyberspatial (and significantly more commercial) Internet and World Wide Web we all know and love (and where we all spend too much time, imho).

Way back at the end of the last century (and still true today!), the best I could hope for was to get an invitation from a reader for a guided tour of some small town sight I might otherwise have missed. Readers also wrote to me with suggestions of great roads, great pie-and-coffee diners, along with offering me invaluable fact corrections and general fine-tuning of my sense of local history. All of which have been gratefully received and duly noted, helping me to improve Road Trip USA with each successive edition.

To try to recreate the generous spirit of the early “Road Trip USA,” I’m working on establishing a zone here on the roadtripusa.com site where we can share “Trip Tips” and suggestions – starting with some of my recommended itineraries and road stops for readers who have written in to me in the past few weeks.

So please stay tuned!

And I also want to keep communications open with the many websites and travel “bloggers” (people much more cyber-sophisticated than I am), so I will be swapping links with people who have been spreading the word about two-lane highways, road trips and Road Trip USA.

Like these:

From my hometown, Davis California:

A book to buy before booking a road trip
By Wendy Weitzel

The fifth edition of Davis author Jamie Jensen's book "Road Trip USA"
officially launches May 1, but is already available in stores and
online. And with the sluggish economy, the timing couldn't be better.

If you haven't experienced Jensen's way of travel, I highly recommend
it. My family used his books' guidance for several trips in the West,
and may again this summer if we embark on a cross-country adventure…

His Web site, http://roadtripusa.com dishes out advice, "mainly to
try to encourage people to cheer up, hit the road, and enjoy the
USA."

Thank you Wendy, and "Happy Trails" to you and your family!

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Last week, I also had a conversation with JD Rinne at Budget Travel magazine, "The World's Most Useful, $1-a-copy Travel Magazine," which also runs a very informative, wide-ranging website. Their Road Trip of the Month features a 4-day tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway -- check it out.

Budget Travel also has a nice Q&A with me, in which we covered quite a lot of ground.

(From Carhenge to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan... and more.)

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more to come, I promise.