Eyes On The Road

It’s pretty simple what we have here: a few easy magnetic mounts for your phone. Just attach the mount to your dash and attach your phone. Then, you can glance at your navigation without taking your eyes off the road.

They’re pretty neat, and you get three of them for just twenty bucks. One for each of your Chevy Novas. (Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.)

But here’s an earnest question I have that’s tangentially related to this product: Have smartphones improved the great American road trip? Or have they made it worse?

My longest road trip in the pre-smartphone era was probably the one I took between my sophomore and junior year in college. I’d gone from my home in upstate New York to Southern California for a summer job, and when it wrapped up, I drove up the west coast, stopping in San Francisco for a day en route to Portland, Oregon, to pick up my friends and drive to our college in Vermont.

We had cell phones, but the first iPhone had barely been born. For entertainment, we made mix CDs and listened to books-on-tape, and to navigate, we used the road atlas.

In some ways it was magical, even when things got a little weird.

At one point, while chatting, we missed an important turn and ended up on an unpaved cliffside pass in rural Idaho, white-knuckling it going 20 miles per hour in second gear in my little stick-shift hatchback, holding up a chain of angry trucks and SUVs behind us.

At another point, we lost track of gas and found ourselves ticking closer and closer to empty in the middle of a nature preserve, preserving the tank by putting the car in neutral down hills. We saw a dot on the map with a name next to it and assumed it was somewhere we could refuel. A few miles from it, a campsite that advertised gas came up on one of the signs. We could probably make it to the town, we thought, but decided to pull over and fill the tank just to be safe. When we told the guy working there where we’d been planning on stopping, he looked at us confused and said, “That’s not much of a town. There’s no gas there.”

Another time still, we found ourselves in surprisingly heavy traffic as we drove through South Dakota, outside a little town we’d never heard of: Sturgis. Lots of RVs, lots of motorcycles. At one point, a police cruiser merged in and got right behind me. I made sure to go the speed limit and got over to the right to let it go by. It got over too. And turned its lights on. I had “failed to use a blinker while changing lanes,” apparently. One of the cops asked me to step out of the car and come sit with him. His partner stayed with my friends and chatted with them through the window. Every time I asked if everything was okay, the officer said, sure, sure, this was all routine, and he even maintained as much when a K9 Unit SUV pulled up, and another officer led a German Shepherd around my car. Apparently, being a few early-twentysomethings in a laser blue Focus with New York plates makes the cops think you’re the ones to worry about at the motorcycle rally. They graciously let me off with only a warning about the blinker.

All three of these things could’ve been avoided with a smartphone. Siri would’ve told us when to turn. Google would’ve told us where to get gas. And with a bit of research, we might’ve realized we were about to drive through an insanely busy, hectic place and taken a detour.

But is that a good thing? These are memories that have stuck with me for decades. And yet, while they’re fun to recount, none of them were very fun in the moment. So I can’t decide.

Anyway, get some phone mounts if you want them, and then share your thoughts in the comments about whether smartphones have improved road trips or not.