Road-Trip Picnics Are a Casualty of Our Interstate System
12th July 2023
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. Look at an old oil-company roadmap, if you can find one, to get the idea. 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. They required two-hands-on-the-wheel alertness in drivers, who got to know and respect the lay of the landscape.
“Roadside Table One Mile” signs invited you to pull over, switch off the ignition, stretch your legs, uncork that thermos of coffee and have lunch. They were as common, and as eagerly watched-for, as the standardized signage that guides us to branded “services” along the interstates today: “Food Next Exit / McDonalds, Burger King, Cracker Barrel.” Oh boy.