Road trippers stay on course

After years of business travel, Don Bednarek said he gave up flying for good when the airlines cut back on customer service.

But that decision has hardly kept him homebound. With grown children and friends scattered across the country, Bednarek, 73, of Madison, Wis., is a regular on the roads, sometimes logging thousands of miles at a time in his Volkswagen Eurovan.

This fall, the retired television engineer is taking a solo, five-week journey around the West and Southwest, including visits to several favorite mountaintops if the mood strikes.

“Driving is a great pleasure for me,” said Bednarek, who before the Eurovan (which includes a bed and kitchen) took road trips first by motorcycle and later in a Ford station wagon, big enough to sleep a few of his six kids.

“I like it both because of the freedom and because it’s so very cheap,” he said.

Although the economy has depressed leisure travel overall in the United States, Bednarek is one of millions of Americans who continue to hit the highways, seeing car travel as the best alternative in these post-Sept. 11, recessionary times. It is by far the most dominant mode of travel.

Summer 2008 had seen a dramatic 10 percent reduction in the number of Fourth of July travelers from the previous year’s holiday, according to AAA, the automobile association founded more than a century ago. The cause? Economic worries and the price of gas, which rose to about $4 per gallon, the group said. This summer, although gasoline prices dropped by about $1.50 per gallon since last summer, the number of holiday travelers by car varied little, said AAA spokesman Geoff Sundstrom.

Over Memorial Day, about 32.4 million travelers made a trip of more than 50 miles, and about 83 percent of them traveled by automobile. For the Fourth of July holiday, the number of people traveling by air increased slightly from the previous year due to lower airfares, Sundstrom said. But about 88 percent of travelers still went by automobile.

And signs are that road trips will continue to dominate American leisure travel, Sundstrom said.

The idea of hitting the open road — whether in cars packed with kids or going solo to find your freedom — is largely an American phenomenon.

“It’s been ingrained in our DNA,” he said.

Even before Henry Ford’s Model T, considered the first affordable automobile, hit the market in 1908, AAA had organized a national road trip to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Elite drivers traveled cross-country in the 1920s, with some even shipping their cars overseas to tour Europe behind the wheel.

Leisure travel came to a screeching halt during the Great Depression and World War II, which saw the suspension of car production and rationing of gas. But it boomed back in the 1940s, when returning war vets set out to see the country, often with young families in tow.

The development of the Interstate Highway system under President Eisenhower created more possibilities for long trips.

“People had all this freedom and access to places they otherwise wouldn’t see,” Sundstrom said.

The size of the United States, combined with the lack of an easily accessible rail system, like those in much of Europe, also drew Americans toward car travel. For many, it remains a practical way to get from one point to another — and another and another — without the cost, planning and inconvenience that airline travel can pose.

RVs continued to fill campgrounds this summer, according to the Virginia-based Recreation Vehicle Industry Association, despite declining sales of the large, gas-guzzling vehicles. The trade group cited a survey of RV owners that said 64 percent planned to travel over Labor Day, fairly average but up slightly from last year.

RV enthusiasts say that even with high fuel prices, they save money on motel and restaurant bills.

John Minotti, a 29-year-old coffee shop manager from New Rochelle, N.Y., became a devoted car traveler this summer, using his 1992 Volvo to follow his favorite band, Phish, on their Northeast tour. With a tent, sleeping bag and folding chair stored in the trunk, Minotti followed Phish from Massachusetts to Virginia, driving as much as 1,000 miles in a single weekend.

Driving, he said, is a good way to explore the country, and capitalizes on the freedom that comes with being young and single.

“I just kind of like cruising around,” Minotti said.

“I figure that this is the time in my life when I’m going to get away with doing this for awhile.”