Maybe it’s a bad case of nostalgia; or maybe it’s the fact that my kids are getting older; or maybe it’s because I can’t afford the gas to drive to the edge of town. Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about road trips lately.

A road trip is an express ticket out of your rut. Back home you may be bored with the routine. You know every local McDonald’s and Walmart and Radio Shack inside and out. A trip to a new town will expose you to new and exciting venues. Like when your employer goes looking for a new CEO, a road trip is positively stuffed with promises.

Of course, when you arrive, you’ll find the new McDonald’s is pretty much like the old one; a “nice” Walmart is still a Walmart; and the inside of one Radio Shack is much like another. Arriving at the end of the trip is a lot like the day a new CEO takes over and you realize the only thing that’ll change is the name on the company letterhead.

A road trip isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey.

Really.

It’s about spending several hours trapped with your loved ones in a cramped, noisy space while scenery rolls by unnoticed and you try desperately to remember the lyrics of songs you loved in your youth.

Just a small town girl,
Living in a homely world,
One night she clogged up her drain,
It went everywheeerre…

Misremembering the lyrics to a song is a great way to start one of the most popular driving games of all time … license plate bingo.

Not really.

The popular game I’m thinking about is arguing loudly and at length with everyone else in the car about something so pointless that the only reason you could possibly care is that arguing gives you something to do. (The same principle underlies most congressional filibusters and corporate board meetings.) Over the years I’ve held steadfastly to completely irrational positions on the environment, placement of furniture in our living room (even though we were five hundred miles away from it at the time), and the route we were taking.

The issue of which route to take is particularly contentious because my wife and I have very different views on the proper use of a map. I believe that a map is an effective (if low tech) way to plot the fastest route from point A to point B. My wife believes a map is an effective (if low tech) way to identify five or six scenic side trips.

On one trip through Nevada, she directed me off of the main highway with the intent of taking the scenic trail north through the Valley of Fire.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked, peering at the map. The “road” she wanted us to follow looked more like a printing error or maybe a coffee stain.

“It’ll be fun,” she insisted.

Two hours later we had lost sight of the highway and had come to the realization that the Valley of Fire was just a bunch of colored rocks. We also realized that nobody came out this way much … including the guys who put up road signs. Unmarked intersections outnumbered marked intersections by a ratio of infinity to none and I started to worry about our supplies of gas, food and water.

Actually, food was the least of our problems. Following the tradition of decades of American road trips, we had packed several hundred pounds of junk food “for the trip” with the intent of transferring it to our waistlines one bite at a time. If it was possible to survive on cartoon character fruit snacks, beef jerky, and Cheetos, we were set for weeks.

Of course, we didn’t die. Despite my frequently-voiced concerns that we were hopelessly lost, my wife assured me that she knew exactly where we were. To prove her point, she jabbed her finger at a section of the map which looked like every other section of the map. I kept complaining, she kept pointing, and eventually we found ourselves back at the freeway.

Whereupon I switched from complaining to sulking and she went straight into a mild gloat.

That whole misadventure was only possible because we were traveling in the days before GPS navigation. Today we’ve given up maps and trust our lives to a device the size of gerbil, but only about half as smart. Getting somewhere is a matter of doing what the computer says.

That is, if you can actually figure out how to program your GPS. According to the instructions, setting a destination is as simple as; selecting ‘Destination’ from the main menu; scrolling through the continent list; selecting the appropriate region, state, or province; identifying a city using the on-screen QWERTY keyboard; scrolling through a list of streets; selecting the address which most closely matches your desired destination; and deciding if you want the fastest or shortest route. This is mostly to keep you busy while the GPS plots ways to fool you into driving as far as possible out of your way.

My parents own a GPS navigation unit which appears to be programmed with some advanced form of artificial stupidity. No matter what their origin or destination, it wants to take them through Montana. Utah to Wyoming? Drive to Montana and turn southeast. Texas to Florida? Drive northwest to Montana and then head southeast. California to Hawaii? Straight through Montana. If they try driving any way except through Montana, the GPS lady gets very cross and scolds them and tells them to “turn left now”. Eventually, for the sake of peace, they break down and throw the GPS out of the window.

Which, of course, misses the point. The point of a road trip is the trip and the GPS is just trying to prolong that. After all, if you don’t spend enough time on the road you’ll never remember the lyrics to that song.

Kevin Cummings is a husband, father, middle-manager, writer, podcaster … I’ve got it all! Each week I produce a brand new humor essay. You can read them on his site or listen to them in audio form at his podcast site.