I can remember...

This reminded me of the annual summer trips to West Virginia to visit the grandparents in the 1950s:

Signs announcing roadside picnic tables once peppered America’s secondary roads and highways. Or so we call those byways now. Before the limited-access interstate system arrived in the 1960s, these roads were primary. America then was laced with a tangle of serviceable two-lane, hard-surfaced highways. .... Some roads were federal, some state, but all were emphatically open-access: get on anywhere, pull over wherever you like. They led through cities and towns, not around them; they traversed the countryside more than they cut through it. ....

For middle- or working-class families, “vacation” meant loading up the family’s one and only car with suitcases and picnic supplies and heading off — to the beach or the mountains or to the grandparents’ house. Cars were big and roomy and seldom air-conditioned, with plenty of room for two parents and two brothers, with space reserved in the trunk, or in the well behind the second seat if it was a station wagon, for some simple groceries and a cooler.

Millions of American families have their own memories of those journeys and the road fare that accompanied them. .... The morning of departure, ice cubes from the small freezer compartment of the kitchen fridge were tumbled into the bottom, followed by small cans of fruit juice, V-8 and orange-pineapple. Bottled water was unheard of and soft drinks were a special treat, bought for a dime in glass bottles from a gas station vending machine. At the top of the cooler was a fitted metal tray that suspended food to be kept cool and dry: hardboiled eggs, sliced bologna or some other luncheon meat (maybe cold chicken the first day out). There were green grapes, a jar of French’s yellow mustard, a knife for spreading, a church-key for opening. If mother had made sandwiches ahead of time, they were, in that pre-baggie era, wrapped in cellophane. A paper grocery bag held white Sunbeam or Wonder Bread, a box of Triscuits, paper napkins, picnic-size salt and pepper for the eggs while they lasted. ....

The interstates, which have so speeded travel times and without which many would find driving unthinkable, have also stolen our experience of pretty much anything that lies between our points of departure and arrival. The roadside table is one casualty. ....

Peter and Timothy Jacobson, "Road-trip picnics are a casualty of our interstate system," The Spectator, August 2023.