<p>The road trip is the American dream on wheels. With just a driver’s license and the top down with your main squeeze in the passenger’s seat, history, poetry, and film, all tell you the same thing: you can go anywhere. Or ... you could, if gas prices weren’t rising again and the roads in the United States were nearly as much as an escape as they used to be twenty or thirty years ago.</p><p>These days, development has taken much away from the poetry of driving out on the open road in your convertible heap. For one thing, I don’t think there exists such a thing as a convertible heap anymore. Those likely went the way of the dinosaur. Moreover, with gas still selling for (admittedly much lower prices than this time last year) just under three dollars in some places, it just isn’t economical.</p><p>Lastly, the “open road” is as much about a rejection of civilization and a yearning for the frontier life of the first pioneers that lived over a century ago. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find any extended piece of land in the United States without a WiFi signal.</p><p>New age pioneers will just have to face the truth at some point, that the frontier and the Jack Kerouac and Easy Rider versions of the road either don’t exist anymore, or are unattainable, as a result of the world we live in today. </p>