When I was a little kid, we sometimes went to visit my aunt and her family, who lived 100 miles away! It was considered a big deal by my parents to travel such a distance. During WW II, there was rationing of gasoline but auto travel has changed in many other ways, too. We had never heard of seat belts. Gas stations or "service stations" were much less common than today but each one was prepared to handle more car repairs that many are today. That was the era before self-service and each station has one or more attendants who rushed outside (most of the time) when you pulled up. They filled the tank, cleaned the windshield, put air in the tires if needed.
The vehicles and the tires were not as well designed as today's. Flat tires were much more common. There were no superhighways or interstates. I recall very clearly that my father shouted out one time, "We are traveling at 60 miles an hour! That's a mile a minute!" Now sixty can seem pretty slow.
We can make phone calls while the car is in motion and in some cases, search the web, too. We have on-board DVD players to show movies and individualized players and sound for different passengers to watch and listen to different programs simultaneously.
There are some small towns now with no motels but most of the time, a variety of accommodations and prices are available for lodging and a variety of places to eat, too. Credit cards make paying easy, sometimes too easy. ATM machines are everywhere and it is easy to withdraw money and to check your account balance.
When places like Holiday Inn began to be national brands so that travelers felt they knew what they would be getting for a room, a new reliability in auto travel emerged. Of course, we had no compact refrigerators and microwaves so having such accommodations right in our room was unheard of. And we are quite used to having dozens of channels of television to watch as well as the latest movies.
