Road Trip

Fun Facts About Road Trips

• A Swiss couple holds the Guinness World Record for the longest journey in the same vehicle. They have covered over 460,000 miles and visited 186 countries. As of recent reports, they are still going!
• Route 66 was one of the first U.S. highways established in 1926. This legendary 2,400-mile route connecting Chicago to Santa Monica was dubbed "The Mother Road" by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, the "Main Street of America", and celebrated in song by Nat King Cole.
• U.S. Interstate Highway System signs are green because that color stood out best in tests held on an unopened section of the Capital Beltway in Maryland in the late-1950s.
• The Pan-American Highway is considered the world's longest almost continuous road, stretching about 19,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina. The 66-mile Darien Gap is impassable by standard vehicles and travelers typically use ferries to cross it.
• Road trips can actually improve your health. Studies confirm they lower the risk of heart disease and enhance your mood, improve sleep, increase productivity and foster overall well-being long after you return.
• New Jersey is the only U.S. state that still generally prohibits self-service gas pumping.
• White center lines on roads were inspired by a man seeing a leaking milk wagon leaving a white trail on the pavement in 1911. Today, they're standard worldwide for safety.
• Long before Jack Kerouac's famous Beat Generation road trips, there were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. Their publicized camping vacations in the 1910s helped popularize the idea of driving for fun across America.
• The longest continuous road in the U.S. is Route 20. It's a historic coast-to-coast route stretching 3,365 miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon, passing through twelve states.