Roadsters, Rumbleseats and Country Drives - Review

The video of Roadsters, Rumbleseats and Country Drives gives a nostalgic look at the growth of the automobile from its beginnings and how the car changed our culture. It has lots of sharp video of restored automobiles on the road and well as excellent archival movies and stills from the early 20th century. While this video has a happy “Good Ole Days” focus on the old cars and the driver’s memories, it also has a quick history of the first of the country’s first roads. Highways highlighted include the pre-automobile National Road. Also called the Cumberland Road, it was begun long before the car in 1811 and was also the first road to break though the Appalachian Mountains. The Lincoln Highway and Route 66 are also given their due as part of America’s love of their cars and the nostalgia of road trip.

The video is very well produced, not amateurish. The hard core road geek will know most of the road trivia presented, but it's so well produced, it is easily enjoyed.

Get this video here.

More web information on the National Road

When the National Road was numbered it became US 40, read more at Route40.net.
The Lincoln Highway book
A Guide to the National Road

Help preserve and find out more about the Lincoln Highway.

The Loneliest Road

It’s 287 miles of US Route 50 in between Fallon and the Utah border in Nevada. It’s called The Loneliest Road in America, for good reason. Even AAA doesn’t recommend driving it. It’s a fine highway, but very, very isolated. It’s not as isolated as when it was the Pony Express Trail or part of the Lincoln Highway, but pretty far out by current standards.

I have only driven a little bit of US 50 in Western Nevada, but it doesn’t take you long to feel you are “out there”. All it takes is a little dust blowing across the road and no cars in sight, and you feel really isolated, really fast. My wife became a bit nervous wondering if we had lost our way.

Nevada tourism folks came up with a fun idea for this “exotic” road. You can pick up free “survival kit” in every town. After completing the survival kit, travelers are rewarded with a survival certificate, a Route 50 lapel pin, and a bumper sticker proclaiming that they have survived this "uninteresting and empty" road. Their survival kit won’t do much if you get stranded, so you are advised to bring along some survival tools as help along the road is miles and miles apart.

The Loneliest Road in America is an official National Scenic Byway. For more information on this byway and other byways around the US, go to http://www.byways.org/explore/byways/2033/




Why is it so lonely? Some political wrangling moved the mainline of the original transcontinental Lincoln Highway as it went west of Salt Lake City. The route was supposed to go southwest from Salt Lake City to the east end of the Loneliest Road near the Utah-Nevada border. Even though private interests had begun to build that highway through what is now the Dugway Proving Grounds, political wrangling moved Lincoln Highway north to the present day route of I-80 and former US 40. So now tons of traffic avoids what could have been a very busy highway, instead of The Loneliest Road in America.