Traveling changes, like just about everything else

It was a relatively short day-trip, but it set me to thinking about how much travel by automobile has changed. I was driving up to spend the weekend leading into Independence Day with my son in Athens, Georgia. He’s lived there for several years, but this was my first visit. And because I’m willing to do almost anything to avoid driving through Atlanta, as he normally does on his visits home, I chose to turn east of the city and go a good bit of the way on roads less traveled than the Interstates.

In the good old days, I would have taken a few minutes, probably after slinging a suitcase into the trunk and settling a bag of snacks in easy reach, to unfold my road map. It would have been one of several kept always in the car. I like the feel of a map and the advantage it offers of being able to see the land stretched out on your kitchen table. If the route I chose was the least bit complicated, I would mark it with a pencil. Didn’t matter if I marked up the map – they were free for the asking at your nearest service station. And like the station, they would display a large “ESSO” or “Gulf” or other well-known gasoline logo.

But free road maps have gone the way of the telephone book. Both have been deleted from our lives under the apparent conclusion that anybody who isn’t connected to a disembodied voice giving directions, and who doesn’t communicate via a telephone no longer connected to anything by wire but stuffed into one’s pocket, is dead or soon will be.

That little telephone is so helpful that it almost makes giving up telephone books worthwhile. It will help me select a route, then send that lady’s voice right through the car’s sound system to give me instructions for following the route I selected. It does for free what my previous on-board GPS system did for a lot of money, and it does it better. As for the disembodied voice, I think the lady hiding in the phone has matured and softened a bit. In the past, she often seemed irritated when I failed to do what she’d told me, and she would snap at me to make a U-turn as soon as possible. But I noticed on this last trip that when I failed to turn where she’d told me to turn, she simply waited until she could give me new instructions that would still lead me where she wanted me to go. For a while, I thought maybe she was developing special feelings for me, but then it dawned on me that it was more likely she was just being kind to an old geezer.

I noticed that, even on the smallest, most rural of the roads I followed, the old two-pump gas stations here and there, with a fellow who ambled out to pump your gas, seem to have followed the telephone book out of existence. As have most of the blue and white telephone booths that often sat nearby. But, no matter. Modern cars don’t need to stop for fuel as frequently as the old gas-guzzlers I used to drive. And if I have to make a phone call, I need only punch a button on the steering wheel. That sweet lady hiding in the phone will ask me who I want to call and then dial the number for me.

I have to admit, modern trips by automobile, with all the latest technology, leave me feeling cosseted and spoiled. And I know, human nature being what it is, that when I pine for the good old days with their folded road maps, two-pump gas stations, and outside pay-phone booths, I’m conveniently forgetting that most of those gas stations offered modest conveniences compared to the ones I use today. And that the phone booths as often as not were already missing the phone books whose passing I mourn. And that the road map didn’t speak to me in calm but authoritative tones.

In any case, one reassuring fact has remained unchanged. The best part of the trip was when I made that last turn into my own driveway.

This story was originally published July 9, 2016 at 6:48 PM with the headline "Traveling changes, like just about everything else."