Our rules for road tripping

Below is an excerpt from my column on It’s a Southern Thing. Click here to be redirected to the full column.

Sweetums and I love road trips, which have been seriously curtailed since the beginning of the pandemic. But road trips through the South are how I find so many interesting roadside attractions to write about, so we’ve found a way to travel while adhering to social distancing guidelines.

The fact that many quirky sites are located right there on the roadside for anyone to see helps a lot. We can drive through a town and check off any World’s Largest Things, oversized sculptures of eyeballs or roosters, or houses covered in coffee mugs.

On the few occasions when we do decide to exit the car – we recently passed by the World’s Largest Toy Museum in Branson, Mo., and there was no way I could keep Sweetums from stopping – we wear our masks and avoid clusters of people.

Other than taking selfies beside giant forks or Rubick’s Cubes, the best part of road-tripping is that we get along so well while traveling. Largely that’s because we have created a routine and a set of road-trip rules… continued. Click here to read the full column.