I just had a conversation with my niece and she brought up a trip she took as a teen that I didn't even know her family made. In was in 1993 and the parents had picked up AAA TripTiks for the entire routing - and they never diverged from that "plan". The father was trying to hit as many states as possible. That's the polar opposite of how I like to travel, but was wondering if anyone else had similar TripTiks travel "adventures"?

Not diverging from the trip plan makes sense because it is a customized trip. The father planned it, right?

My hairstylist's family of 3 goes on annual road trips for something like 10 days. The father wants their son to visit all 50 states before son goes off to college. That is his mission, not hers, but she goes along with it. You could spend a week or more in Pennsylvania, Gettysburg + Amish country + Philly or Pittsburgh + Fallingwater ect, or the Poconos. Or you could just stop in Erie, in that strip of PA between NY and Ohio to check PA off the list. Yesterday you got NY and tomorrow you will get OH.

Funny you started this as over the weekend, I was cleaning out some of my dad's paperwork and found a Trip Tik Routing book. It was created on 22JUN2019 going from our area to Pensacola, FL. My dad never took the trip as it was for his Navy reunion. He just had a few health issues as did my mom so that long of a car ride back and forth would have been too much on them. I'm sure looking at it, they could have stuck to the route, but I doubt my parents would have. Starting out, I would never go the way it says to go as to get to PA is only a few minutes' drive so why go around to get there? Doesn't make much sense to me.

My dad was also in the Navy stationed in Pensacola.

No one in my family used TT... to my knowledge.

I remember those AAA TripTiks too! My family used them a couple of times in the 90s and we followed them pretty closely. It was a fun way to track the route before GPS and smartphones, though now I definitely prefer more flexibility when traveling.

Back in the mid 90s I ordered a Trip Tik, talking on the phone with the agent as one did. Didn't look too closely until we were on our trip, traveling through the Southwest. That's when we discovered that "Las Vegas" was mapped as Las Vegas, New Mexico, and not Las Vegas, Nevada. We had to scramble for a map to replan, and much of the Trip Tik booklet was useless.

I still use Trip Tik when planning, but I do it myself using their online website. Mostly I save in the app and reduce some to PDF on my computer, only printing out the parts that I really need. In conjunction with Google Maps, this works well for us. We are map people as well, so we always have plenty of paper reference.

We do tend to take longer road trips, including several cross-country, Florida to PNW.

Yss. My parents always used information from AAA - Trip Tiks with maps and routes highlighted, booklets listing places to stay, etc. for all our camping and road trips. This was California in the late 50's and early 60's.