Has Siri Killed the Road Trip?

June Men's Room

The summer before I turned twenty-three, I bought a midnight blue ’66 Chevy Impala and headed west for a rite of passage called The Great American Road Trip.

The previous year, I’d worked as a paralegal at a corporate law firm. I hated it. At lunch, I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, two road trip classics, and dreamed of the adventures I’d have once I finally saved enough to buy an old muscle car and hit the open road.

As I pulled the Impala onto the first blue highway, I had all the tools available to the road tripper of 1992: a paperback road atlas, a prepaid long distance card, and a guidebook to the national parks. But while I wandered for seven glorious weeks from Wilmington to New Orleans, San Antonio to Santa Fe, Joshua Tree to Venice Beach, here’s what I didn’t have: a cell phone, GPS, or the Internet.

Imagine it. Traveling without Yelp to recommend the best ribs in Memphis, without Google to know what time the Alamo closes, without Siri to ensure you don’t miss the exit to Graceland. To millennials, traveling like this must sound terribly primitive, filled with inefficiencies, mistakes, wrong turns.

But everything memorable about that trip was the result of chance. The great bands in Austin as I wandered into random bars on 6th Street. The old hippie I happened to meet in Albuquerque who had me out to her garlic farm in Taos. The crazy Australian I randomly bunked with at the hostel on the Navajo reservation, who later rode with me all the way to the Pacific.

This summer, my twenty-one-year-old stepson, Oskar, and I will take our own road trip west. I’m excited to travel with Oskar, but I’m also worried. Worried that new technology has made the road too easy, too predictable, too curated. Worried that Siri killed The Great American Road Trip while I was too busy downloading podcasts on my iPhone to notice.

Technology promises convenience and connection, but isn’t the road trip about improvisation and disconnection? That’s the hero’s journey, right? You leave the predictable comforts of home, travel through strange, sometimes dangerous, lands, and return transformed to share stories with wide-eyed homebodies. Can you imagine Frodo live tweeting his adventures for everyone back at the Shire? Or Luke and Obi-Wan using Angie’s List to find a pilot instead of wandering into the cantina where they chanced to meet Han Solo? Or Kerouac posting selfies to Instagram while he careened across America?

Oskar and I are determined to rescue our road trip from Siri. We’ll stash our phones in the trunk for emergencies only. Stay off social media. Use a road atlas. And when we get lost, which is bound to happen, maybe we’ll do what we all did before technology made it unnecessary.

Maybe we’ll stop. Look around. Ask directions. Maybe we’ll actually talk to people.

Can you imagine that?  

Dylan Patterson is a writer and filmmaker who teaches English at Cape Fear Community College. 

To view more of illustrator Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.