American Road Trip Talk

Our Spring 2015 issue of American Road Magazine was dedicated to the Trail of the Ancients, finding some of the American Road’s oldest attractions. The Upper and Lower Dells of the Wisconsin River are one of Nature’s works of art in Southwest Wisconsin that have been a tourist attraction since just after the Civil War. It is also the site in 2015 of the 70th anniversary of its famous Duck Tours. N...

That soft, sweet, summertime sensation better known as DQ or Dairy Queen has been a favorite diversion on the American Road for three quarters of a century. In the fall of 2013 I traveled to downtown Joliet, Illinois to visit the site of the very first DQ in America. Our Spring 2015 issue is dedicate to the oldest things along the American road and this certain fits the bill. My tour guide was for...

The Spring 2015 issue of American Road Magazine was dedicated to tracking down the Ancients along the American highway. One of the stories was a fish tale about the oldest resident at the world famous Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Its name is “Granddad”, and he’s an Australian lungfish, a scaly survivor of prehistoric times found in very few places around the globe. Our guest, Mike Marselis, is one o...

The winter issue of American Road Magazine featured an article entitled American Road’s Big Birds. The story stretched from coast to coast and the steamy south to the cold north in the search of truly large birds or to be more precise their artistic representations like the 21-ton Pheasant in Huron, S. Dakota or the Big Duck on Long Island, NY. In today’s podcast Doris Schneider, the VP of the Fri...

Tunnel Vision always provides our readers with snapshots of fascinating places along the American Road. Our Autumn 2014 issue featured a story about a Contrary Barber Pole at the National Barber Museum in the Columbus, OH suburb of Canal Winchester. Mike Ippoliti is the curator/director of the huge collection of tonsorial memorabilia and he joins us to talk about a recent tragedy that almost wiped...

Randy Goodpasture runs a national pigeon race that runs along Route 66 in OK. This is the first part of two podcasts featuring Randy talking about the pigeons and the race. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Randy Goodpasture runs a national pigeon race that runs along Route 66 in OK. This is the second part of two podcasts featuring Randy talking about his Oklahoma flock of racing pigeons who use Route 66 as their guide in the +100 mile competitions at speeds near 80 MPH. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

In our winter 2014 edition of American Road Magazine, the Tunnel Vision column featured an article that is bound to get you started on the right foot…unless you’re a tea drinker. I’m talking about the Coffee Trail in Columbus, Ohio! In this podcast Meguni Robinson of Experience Columbus will tell you how a group of local businesses got together to create a unique way of promoting their themselves...

One thing American Road readers seems to have in common is that they are avid travelers. It’s not enough for most of us to get information about sites; we want to be there as well. A new tool to help you find a very special place to stay is the website of the National Trust for Historic Preservation which is found at www.historichotels.org. Heather Taylor is a spokesperson for National Historic Ho...

It’s a brand new year for American Road Magazine and for American Road Trip Talk. Normally we use this podcast to introduce you to the people and places behind the stories in the magazine. This time around we are going to cast our gaze in another direction, forward into 2015 in Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. Along Route 66 in Springfield, Illinois you w...

The fall 2014 edition of our magazine had fun with the theme of Rock, Paper, Scissors and included stories about everything from a Wall of Scissors to a Waffle Rock and a Paper House. In this podcast we visit with Edna Beaudoin, who is the current caretaker of the Paper House, which is located in the scenic seaside town of Rockport, MA just north of Boston. What started out as a summer project in...

In 2013 American Road Magazine featured a unique store in rural Indiana that has weathered the changes in American toy tastes for the past 75 years. Veach’s Toy Station has found a way to the heart of the child in all of us for three generation of the Veach family in Richmond, Indiana. In part 2 of the conversation that we had with John Veach, the current owner, he begins by reflecting on the reap...

Rebecca Repp is the General Manager of American Road Magazine which she publishes along with husband Thomas Repp. Normally Becky stays behind the scenes but in the 2014 Spring Issue she stepped from behind the headlines into our Tunnel Vision section. There we learned about her appointment to the America’s Byways Foundation. This group is a non-profit group organized years ago to help Byway commit...

In our Fall issue of the magazine, the Tunnel Vision column features a story about Old 41 Caters to Gaters. It was the tale of the valiant efforts of John Brady, a local photographer, to save one of the last everglade showplaces in Florida. The Everglades Wonder Gardens. In part two we will hear about the colorful history of the original Wonder Gardens and how it has come to be one of the last pla...

It’s holiday time and that’s the time for giving toys to our favorite girls and boys. In 2013 American Road Magazine featured a unique store in rural Indiana that has weathered the changes in American toy tastes for the past 75 years. Veach’s Toy Station has found a way to the heart of the child in all of us for three generation of the Veach family in Richmond, Indiana. This podcast is part 1 of t...

In our Fall issue of the magazine, the Tunnel Vision column features a story about Old 41 Caters to Gaters. It was the tale of the valiant efforts of John Brady, a local photographer, to save one of the last everglade showplaces in Florida. The Everglades Wonder Gardens. In our first part of the story in this podcast, John tells the story of how this famous, original Florida roadside attraction wa...

In our Fall 2014 issue of American Road Magazine an article entitled Rock, Paper, Scissor featured a visit to the Cardboard Boat Museum in New Richmond, Ohio. Our guest for part 2 of our podcast about the museum is Ray Perszyk a colorful Ohio river man who is the chairman of the Cardboard Race Committee. It might seem remarkable that craft made of something so frail as cardboard could last up to 1...

Normally you wouldn’t associate anything make out of cardboard with the word “racing” but the paper flotillas of New Richmond, Ohio defy that notion. In our Fall 2014 issue of American Road Magazine a clever article entitled Rock, Paper, Scissor included a visit to the Cardboard Boat Museum in that little Ohio river town. Our guest is Ray Perszyk a colorful local who is the chairman of the Cardboa...

For many of us the image of North Dakota the pops to mind comes from the movie Fargo: A vast sea of white snow, bitter cold and knife like winds. Needless to say there is much more to the Peace Garden State than that and the newly expanded State Museum in Bismarck says it all. Our guest today is Kim Jondahl, Communication and Education director for the State Historical Society of North Dakota. At...

A lot of our listeners/readers are avid travelers and many use the itineraries posted on our American Road Magazine homepage. The holiday season for 2014 is just starting to get into high gear whether grandma lives in Tampa, Fl or Topiniabee, Michigan, Spokane, WA or Seabrook Island, SC. The folks at the National Motor Club have your best interests at heart and have a special winter driving checkl...

In the Friends in the Fast Lane column of our Fall 2014 magazine, we highlighted the official designation of a portion of a famous California costal highway as part of the Purple Heart Trail. In reality the famous commemorative trail is not a contiguous, physical route but rather a symbolic system of roads honoring the men and women of our armed forces over the decades. In this podcast we speak wi...

Drive in theatres have been featured in a couple of issues of our magazine because they are a unique part of the American Road heritage. The same goes for diners; we even have a regular column called Diner Days. In our summer 2014 issue we featured the Mayberry Diner and Drive In, a unique combination of these two classics. In this podcast we talk with Bob Craig the owner of this fine establishmen...

In the summer edition of American Road Magazine Erika Nelson, author of the Think Big column, found a big bottle of pop to quench her thirst: a 66 ‘ bottle to be exact outside of Pops Restaurant in Arcadia, OK. We talked extensively in another podcast with her about the enormous roadside attraction but the restaurant behind it looked just as interesting. Enter Marty Doepke, General Manager for Pop...

Erika Nelson is someone who is hard to catch up to because she is always on the road and always traveling. The big game she is hunting, literally Big Game, are the largest attractions along the American Road. Erika then turns them into the smallest replicas of the Largest Attractions on the American Road. And she has a travelling collection. She also contributes a regular column about her finds ca...

In the summer issue of American Road Magazine we took a jog through the Deep South in Tunnel Vision and explored the Grand Gulf-Raymond Scenic Byway. Signs have finally been put up that tells the story of this 50 mile stretch of southern byway beauty which traces one of the most significant marches in America’s bloody Civil War. Our guest on this podcast is Ret. General Parker Hills, a Civil War m...