We’ve written occasionally about the cult appeal of Chinatown buses, which offer dirt-cheap rides between Chinatowns in a number of Eastern U.S. cities. To compete, Greyhound has launched its own budget option, BoltBus, which features online booking, power outlets and, perhaps coolest of all, free Wi-Fi. So how’s the ride? Daniel Sorid bought a round-trip ticket from New York to Philadelphia for all of $2.50 and found himself the lone passenger on the journey. 

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Up until recently, we figured one of the most serious threats facing the American road trip was the demise of the indie motels and family-run diners lining the likes of Route 66. But now that we’re entering the age of the $4 gallon, will even more people bypass the classic routes in favor of the interstate? Or will road-trippers just stay home entirely?

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My first thought about this cross-country “outreach mission of the Typo Eradication Advancement League”: Brilliant idea. Second thought: “Hunt” might be too strong of a word, since any traveler with an eye for typos knows, they’re in plain sight everywhere. Of course, since project founder, Jeff Deck, and his fellow typo-seeking travelers began their road trip last month, they’ve chronicled hundreds of typos. They’ve also corrected many of them because, as the project manifesto states, “only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.”

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More specifically, he asks, as the subhead of his rambling story in The Believer says, “What’s the difference between a road movie and a movie that just happens to have roads in it?” Klosterman’s attempt to get to the bottom of the question involves references to “non-dead author John Leland,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It also includes equations, such as this:

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I feel for Ramak Fazel. Not just because he ran out of money and couldn’t reach Juneau, Alaska, the 50th and final capitol in his quest, but because of the maddening difficulties he encountered as he trekked to the other 49 U.S. state capitol buildings for an art project that makes its debut tomorrow in New York City. 

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Speaking of how confusing geography can be, I’ve been planning a big road trip in the South in March, and I’m hoping to hit some major music history landmarks along the way. Memphis is a no-brainer, but I’d like to see some lesser-known sites too, and even places where there may not be anything concrete to see, but where the name still means something to me. I thought Jackson could be one of those places—you know, the Jackson town that Johnny Cash and June Carter sing about?

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Some inspired travel-related musings from the bard of Lake Wobegon this week in Salon. In Just Follow the Map, he writes: 

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NPR’s Stephen Thompson recently drove 1,000 miles to see his family for Thanksgiving and, en route, listened to hours and hours of Christmas music, both cool and corny. Think Eileen Ivers and Carnie Wilson, Josh Groban and Michael Bolton, and even “A Twismas Story” by the late country crooner Conway Twitty. Would I be a loser if the idea of Mr. Thompson’s roadtrip soundtrack made me weepy with jealousy? 

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Seems that fewer and fewer people these days want to see the stuffed jackalopes and the live six-legged cow at Prairie Dog Town. So after 40 years, owner Larry Farmer is closing up his petting zoo/freaky taxidermy exhibit in western Kansas—one of many mom-and-pop attractions fading from the American road-trip landscape. In an interesting feature for National Public Radio, Jason Beaubien explores how old bits of Americana such as the Elvis Is Alive Museum are disappearing with the rise of high-tech road trip distractions such as DVD-equipped minivans and iPods.

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From Jack Kerouac to Route 66, there’s no denying the importance of the road in modern American folklore. So I was interested to hear that author Ted Conover’s next book will be about roads “and their power to change the places they connect and the people on them.” In a recent interview published in Matador Travel’s Traverse magazine, he answered questions about his research methods—which have included tagging along for an illegal crossing of the Mexico-U.S. border—and about his views on “the road” and its meaning to him.

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Alexander Roy seems like an idiot. But a media-savvy idiot. A month after first revealing to the world that he and his co-driver David Maher teamed to drive from New York City to Los Angeles in 31 hours and 4 minutes in 2006, the media have kept him and his reckless achievement in the spotlight. Wired devoted a big magazine spread and an online package to the road trip this month, and earlier this week National Public Radio weighed in with an 8 minute and 18 second piece on Roy and his epic ride. 

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Who better than Walter Salles to define what makes a stellar road movie? The Brazilian director of the best road movie in recent years, The Motorcycle Diaries, and the upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, wrote an excellent essay in the New York Times Magazine outlining his “theory of the road movie.” Salles gets the influences out of the way in short order—all road movies, he believes, owe a debt to “The Odyssey”—then dives into an insightful analysis of the ingredients of a great road movie. It should resonate with anyone who looks at travel as an immersive, life-altering experience. 

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