’Tis the season for the summer road trip

We’re sharing our stories but are eager to read your tales as well

By Larry Edsall - July 1, 2021

Larry Edsall is at the National Corvette Museum, midway through a 7,500-mile summer road trip that's also a fund-raiser for the fight against Parkinson's | Larry Edsall photo

(Editor’s note: During the month of July, the ClassicCars.com Journal is publishing a series of stories about summer road trips. Larry Edsall, who is in the midst of a 7,500-mile summer road trip, introduces the theme today. In addition to our own tales from the road, we’re eager to share your stories about summer road trips you’ve done, with family, in a classic car, perhaps in a classic car when it was just the family cruiser. Please submit your stories and a few photos from your trip to journal@classiccars.com.)

I’m not sure if it is fitting or ironic that I’m typing on my laptop sitting atop a desk at the La Quinta by Wyndham in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where I’m perhaps midway through a summer road trip that began in Nevada, took us (traveling with a soon-to-be 11-year-old granddaughter) to Florida, and then here (stopped by the National Corvette Museum earlier today en route to Michigan), and later (as my grandparents’ generation used to put it, “God willing and the creek don’t rise”) back to Nevada.

This isn’t just any summer road trip, but one part of the 75 Days of Summer, a fund-raising program for Drive Toward a Cure and its fight against Parkinson’s.

Actually, I’m not sure I’m the right person to be writing about summer road trips because, as a child, many of our family road trips took place in the fall. My parents liked to see places where the leaves turned colors. They’d pull us out of school (but not out of homework), and we’d be off for a week or so.

My first such memory was a trip to New England in 1956. I remember the trip not for the year but because Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history while we were traveling. On the way home, I begged my Dad to stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, but all I saw was the exit sign for that city because Mom wanted to go to the Corning Glass factory and with Dad’s work schedule, we didn’t have time to go both places.

Some 50 years later, I finally got to Cooperstown, on a true summer road trip, and got to share the experience with a grandson, which, as it turned out, made the visit well worth the wait.

Scenic Route is the way to go | Abby Watkins photo