Have you ever been to Marvin's Marvelous Mechanized Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan? How about the Macaulay Museum of Dental History in Charleston, South Carolina? Did you attend the Moxie Days Festival, held annually in Lisbon Falls, Maine, or try out the Booger Hollow Trading Post Double-Decker Outhouse in Dover, Arkansas?

All this and more is outlined in the pages of Road Trip America: A State-By-State Tour Guide to Offbeat Destinations. This book, drawn from author Andrew F. Wood's extensive travel experiences, is a peak into the roadside attractions and tourist traps that typify America's rural highways and are the essence of American road trips. (Neil Gaiman fans will know that his novel American Gods postulated the creation of an entire theology based on such places.)

Wood presents his findings in clear, concise packages -- a two-page spread per state, illustrated primarily with vintage postcard images. Like a bandit, he slips into each state, hits a few key target spots and dashes off to the next, all in easy-to-find alphabetical order. His entries are a pleasure to read and evoke a desire to hit the road as soon as possible, preferably in a vintage red mid-'50s convertible with the radio cranked to an oldies station.

The only real weakness of the book is the very brevity that makes it such an easy read. Two pages per state? C'mon, Andy, there's lots more than that to discover and explore! Granted, he leaves plenty of room for people to set out on their own highway pilgrimages, but it seems like the book could easily have filled twice as many pages and still left plenty of gaps.

Road Trip America is a sampler, the barest taste of the rich flavor of Americana that waits just around the corner, just another mile or two down the road, in every state across the nation. I'll look forward to a revised and expanded version in the future; meanwhile, I need to fill the tank and put some miles between here and there.

- Rambles
written by Tom Knapp
published 28 June 2003