“Took six hours,” Jenny told me, to drive with her eight-year-old son Trent from Indiana to Tennessee to see the relatives.
“How did you keep him entertained?” I asked.
She answered that Trent spent most of the trip talking and reading on his iPhone.
“Jenny, ever hear of the Burma Shave signs alongside the highway?” Of course, she hadn’t. The funny signs disappeared in the 1960s. I remembered that Mom had to devise new games to keep our brats from killing each other.
“First one to see a white horse?” That one didn’t last long in Texas. ‘I spy…’ worked for about 15 minutes.
When we stopped for gasoline, we made the four children run around the station—at least three times. Interstate tourist facilities came none too soon. Especially when the dog also rode in the back seat.
The Highway departments didn’t furnish enough mileage signs to silence “Are we there yet?” But when we drove the main Carolina Interstate from North to South, we saw signs similar to Burma Shave. The upcoming tourist stop furnished billboards so ‘Pedro’ could tell you how many minutes before you stopped at ‘South of the Border.’
Easier now to quell “Are we there yet?” Jenny found the answer: “Look at the map on your iPhone.”
Photo credit Steve Loveless Photography
