Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, by Richard Ratay

Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips - before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps. 

The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming - sans seatbelts! - to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations.

In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them - from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

“Deceptively informative, this high-spirited romp down the byways of America is part social history, part memoir, and a loving salute to that brief time when the wood-paneled family station wagon was king of the open road.” - New York Times Book Review

“A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” - Kirkus Reviews