Fetters: One thing I found so relatable about your book was the descriptions of your parents disagreeing about how to manage time and manage kids on the road. I especially loved the part about your dad driving right up to the brink of running out of gas. Somehow family road-trip vacations, to me, are where you really see reinforcement of certain, stereotypical parental roles: this idea that dads are risk takers and moms are voices of reason.

Ratay: It bridges generations, right? I mean, this book is very much a love letter to my parents, and a thank-you to them for the opportunities they provided us to visit different areas of the country and enjoy all those experiences together. We still take a lot of road trips in my family, in my present family, and there are times where I feel myself assuming the role of my own father. Saying things like Don’t make me pull over! and kind of becoming him in a way.

I also wrote the book because my parents passed away at a very young age, and my children never had a chance to meet them. Very few of my nieces did as well. I wrote the book to capture that experience, so that they would be able to get to know their grandparents a little bit, and also get to know what it was like for us; to give them a taste of what our life was like when we were their same ages.

Fetters: You gesture a lot in the book at the fact that, before there was cheap airfare [in part due to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978], the journey itself was a bigger part of the family vacation. You mention how driving through parts of the country that you don’t live in exposes you to people living in different ways from you; you describe driving past kids working in the field with their parents. What was the most surprising thing you learned in your own family vacations about how other people lived?

Ratay: Oh, boy. There were so many things. Food was so different in different parts of the country, and people spoke so differently. We’d make it down into New Orleans and the Deep South oftentimes, so to eat things like fried catfish and okra and po’boys and gumbo. Those were very different dishes from what we had in Wisconsin in the 1970s. And the way people talked! I could barely understand some of the people in the South, with their thick southern drawls.

Fetters: You seem a little bit sad at the end of the book about some of the ways in which vacations have evolved since your childhood. Is there anything you’ve made a point to do or emphasize on your own family vacations now, to preserve the ethos of the vacations you went on as a kid?

Ratay: Yes. Yes. I’m very conscious about making the journey part of the destination and its own reward, and so my wife and I are very conscious about picking out great places for us to stop along the way. We went out to Mount Rushmore a few years ago, but we took kind of a meandering route and went through Iowa and we stopped off at the Field of Dreams, where they shot the movie. We were just there for an hour, but it was a great stop.