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Hmmm. A family and a vehicle. Wonder what genre this could be?

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."
E. B. White, One Man's Meat

A Road-Trip Plot is a work about characters taking a trip to go from point A to point Z, usually in a car. Along the way, they stop by points B, C, D, et al, in diners, motels and Small Towns, while things happen to them at each point. It may be a silly comedy or a drama where characters learn things they didn't know about themselves. Unsurprisingly, this type of plot opens itself wide to Cliche Storms and Narm, but creators conscious of what kind of story they are telling can defy these and create very original and poignant tales, because the characters are removed from their everyday environment.

An important distinction needs to be made between a Road Trip Plot and a Walking the Earth story. If the heroes encounter an adventure at every stop and end up staying at each location for a while to solve some major problem or deal with a big event, it's Walking The Earth, especially if each location can be considered an Adventure Town. If, on the other hand, each location is merely a brief stop along the way, and the story is more about the journey than the specific locations, then it's a Road Trip Plot. The former tend to be episodic, with most of the actual travel happening offscreen between destinations, while the latter is more commonly a structure for a self-contained story.

Not all Road Trip Plots involve use of a vehicle, but it's often what one associates with the genre: a family or group of friends traveling in a car—or a van, or on horseback, maybe even on a boat—from one place to another, with stuff happening at each location. A variant is the outlaws on the run Road Trip, in which the hero (or a couple) are pursued by law enforcement. Road movies can overlap with horror if the heroes are fleeing zombies, serial killer families, and the like.

Films with a Road Trip Plot are called "road movies" and are a distinct cinematic genre. Because of the vastness of the continental United States, its extensive highway network, deep-seated car culture, its love of the "rugged individual" character, and a still-lingering affection for The Western (a genre which road movies draw on a lot), most Road Trip Plots take place there. Characters may discover both wholesome, friendly small towns and towns with a seamy underbelly. Historically, the characters are often two male buddies or a couple, but female buddies are also used. The characters are often trying to get away from it all to figure out a personal issue or discover themselves. For this reason, the interaction between the characters is more important than the destination or places they stop.

During Hollywood's Golden Age, Film Noir directors loved road film plots. One of the attractions of the road film was that it was a way around Hays Code censorship rules. A 1940s road movie about an unmarried couple on a road trip would technically follow the rules if the two people stay in separate motel rooms on the trip, but for viewers, knowing that the lovers are alone in the car on the open road and staying in cheap motels got their imagination working.

Live action television programs (As well as other episodic works) often have Road Trip Episodes in which the characters take a trip. Due to the episodic nature of TV—Status Quo Is God—these episodes are typically one-off affairs made to give the characters something new to do and create opportunities for friction.

Road trip episodes can be broken down into several types.

  • Type 1 is The Family Car, the most common, in which the characters pile in a car or an RV and go someplace. It may be a noisy, Chaotic Car Ride if it is Played for Laughs.
    • In subtype 1A, the characters complete the trip and come back, with the Boring Return Journey possibly omitted.
    • In subtype 1B, the trip is never completed for some reason.
  • Type 2 is Public Transportation, in which the characters themselves aren't in control of the vehicle, and may include a bus, a plane, or even a spaceship. This type can easily be derailed by a "Stuck at the Airport" Plot.
  • Type 3, the Alternate Transport, is rarer, and involves characters who are always traveling taking some different mode of transport. Imagine the characters from a show in the Star Trek universe leaving their starship and taking a bus or a shuttle.

Hard Truckin' is a Sister Trope, as it's a road trip, combined with delivering a 18-wheeler's load to its destination. Compare Blake Snyder's description of this plot, under the title Golden Fleece. Also compare The Quest, along with Booker's version of the archetypes behind it.

Very likely to run into at least one Wacky Wayside Tribe along the way.

Contrast with Going to See the Elephant, where the destination starts the plot. See also Buses Are for Freaks, a trope that may overlap with this if the characters are taking the bus somewhere. See also Wanderlust Song, the Music equivalent of this trope. See also Travelogue Show, the non-fiction equivalent of this. For instances where a road trip is dangerous, see Deadly Road Trip. For road trips that are incredibly short, see Road Trip Across the Street.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • The earlier chapters of Dragon Ball evoke this as Goku and Bulma travel the world in search of the titular plot objects.
  • Parts 3, 5, & 7 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are essentially what you get when you combine one of these with a Shōnen Fighting Series, with Part 5 incorporating The Mafia and Part 7 incorporating The Big Race & The Western.
  • Rolling Girls follows a group of girls as the travel from city to city mediating land disputes.
  • Robihachi follows Robby Yarge and Hatchi Kita, two strangers throw together by circumstances, on a trip to Isekandar, the planet where dreams come true. They stop at an assortment of tourist traps and odd planets along the way.

    Comic Books 
  • Asterix and the Banquet is about Asterix and Obelix on a "Tour de Gaule", collecting speciality food from various cities throughout France in a bid for freedom from the Romans, who are enclosing their village from the rest of the world with a stockade.
  • The "Hard-Travelling Heroes" arc in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, where Hal and Ollie travel across the US so Hal can reconnect with ordinary humans and the problems they face.
  • Knights of the Dinner Table has featured multiple arcs where the main characters (and many supporting characters) make the annual pilgrimage to GaryCon. Adventures on the road (before they even get to the con) have included being locked in a basement before they leave; losing all of their luggage; getting stranded in a biker bar; and driving hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.
  • Likewise with the "Superman: Grounded" arc of Superman.
  • An unpublished DC Comics story of The Powerpuff Girls, "Road Trip," has the Professor on his way to a festival out of town with the girls in tow. The girls' misbehavior causes the car to get dismantled piece by piece until, when the car is nothing but strewn parts, the Professor angrily intones that if they don't start behaving, "I'm turning this car around right now!"

    Comic Strips 
  • Garfield and Jon (and sometimes Odie) go on Type 1a road trips occasionally. They've also gone on Type 2 ones.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • Disney's Bolt has the title character trying to travel back from New York City to Los Angeles, with a notable stop in Vegas.
  • Finding Nemo is a story about a fish swimming in the ocean, so there aren't any roads. But otherwise it fits this trope exactly, as Marlin travels across the ocean to find Nemo, meeting many colorful sea creatures along the way.
  • A Goofy Movie is about Goofy (yes, the Disney character) taking his son Max on a father-son trip, while Max attempts to take a trip to a concert he wishes to attend. After Goofy discovers what he's been up to, they end up doing both.
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie revolves around SpongeBob and Patrick going on a road trip with the Patty Wagon to Shell City to retrieve King Neptune's crown, visiting various new locations and encountering strange characters along the way.
  • The Plucky & Hampton subplot from Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation is about a road trip to an amusement park.
  • The Mitchells vs. the Machines features a family going on a cross-country road trip to the main character's college when a robot apocalypse hits. The family spends the remainder of the movie fighting against said apocalypse.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Lampshaded and Enforced in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, where the titular heroes need to get from Los Angeles to New York within 40 hours to stop Fearless Leader from using hyponotically bad TV shows to make people vote for him for President of the United States. As they start out, Rocky questions why they don't just take an airplane and Bullwinkle simply responds "Because then it wouldn't be a road movie."
  • Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. The premise of the film being the the Chipmunks three are rushing to Miami to stop Dave from proposing to his new girlfriend and dumping them, based on a misunderstanding.
  • American Honey follows a traveling magazine sales crew as they traverse multiple states in the Midwest—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota among them.
  • Ana: The two protagonists embark on a road trip for Ana to get back home, and Rafa out of debt.
  • Around the Bend: The patriarch of the Lair family leaves instructions in his will that his son, grandson, and great-grandson go on a road trip to scatter his ashes at various sites across the southwestern US... a series of KFC restaurants. His motivation was for his son and grandson to heal their broken relationship. The ploy works just in time... his son is dying of renal failure himself.
  • Badlands is a super-dark take on this trope, as young lovers Kit and Holly go on a cross-country murder spree after he kills her father.
  • Ballad of a Soldier is about a Russian soldier making a difficult journey home on leave during the darkest days of World War II, and all the people he meets and experiences he has on the way.
  • Barefoot has the protagonists driving from New Orleans to Los Angeles.
  • Between Two Ferns: The Movie: The crew drives from North Carolina to Los Angeles, interviewing several celebrities along the way.
  • Boys on the Side: The first act, before they settle down in Tucson due to Robin's hospitalization.
  • Broker is about brokers who drive around South Korea in search of adoptive parents willing to buy an abandoned baby for a price.
  • Carol takes place on the road for the latter half of the film.
  • Parts of Carry On Camping are based around this, depending on what character story the movie chooses to follow. One subplot follows Charlie Muggins, who spends most of the runtime looking for a place to stay after his tent is blown away in a landmine accident, whilst Peter Potter travels around the countryside with his absent-minded wife Harriet as he has a horrible holiday, as well as two sexually-frustrated thirty-somethings, Sid Boggle and Bernie Lugg, driving around England looking for a nudist camp with their prudish girlfriends Joan Fussey and Anthea Meeks.
  • Cry Macho: an old washed up rodeo star and horse breeder (Clint Eastwood) is sent to Mexico to bring a young man back to his father in Texas. They are forced to take the backroads.
  • Damnation Alley: The survivors of World War III have to travel from the western desert to Albany, New York, which, for some reason, survived all the destruction.
  • Dog: A US Army ranger with PTSD must bring the dog of a fallen comrade to said comrade's funeral, from the State of Washington to Arizona.
  • Dogma is about a trip/chase from Illinois to New Jersey. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is about their shenanigans on the way from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
  • Drive Away Dolls is the story of two best friends who get mixed up in a crime during a road trip to Florida.
  • Due Date is about two strangers being forced to travel together to the hospital where one's wife is giving birth. Turns out this was invoked by the other, who stole his wallet so he'd have to travel with him.
  • Dumb and Dumber, Harry and Lloyd travel from Rhode Island to Colorado on a dog shaped van.
  • Easy Rider centers around the main characters' road trip to New Orleans. It isn't a comedy.
  • Finch (2021): The title character, his dog, and two robot companions go on a road trip west across post-apocalyptic America to San Francisco.
  • Much of Fleisch has trucker Bill and German tourist Monika travelling across the highways of the American southwest in order to rescue the latter's husband, who has been kidnapped by organ traffickers.
  • The Go-Getter When his mother dies, a teenager takes a road-trip in a stolen car to find his long-lost brother.
  • The basic plot of Go Trabi Go revolves around a man and his family seeking to take advantage of their newfound freedom to travel following the reunification of Germany by recreating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey using their family car, a Trabant 601 nicknamed "Schorsch".
  • Honey Baby revolves around a washed-up musician meeting a runaway ballerina on his contractually obligated tour of Europe, and they travel the continent together. It then deconstructs the genre by showing that, while they do become closer, it doesn't make them any happier or closer to understanding themselves and that going home may lead to self-actualization.
  • Interstate 60 features a surreal road trip on a mythical interstate, where the main character tries to find "the answer to his life."
  • The Trope Maker, as far as the "road movie" Sub-Genre is concerned, is It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert is a spoiled heiress who wants to escape her father's detectives and make her way from Florida to New York to get married. Clark Gable is the newspaper reporter who aids her in exchange for the scoop on her story. Naturally, romance ensues.
  • Knockin' on Heaven's Door: Two terminally ill guys with just a couple of days left to live get to know each other and refuse to just sit in a hospital and await their fate. They steal a car and go on a last road trip to see the ocean for the first and last time in their lives. The thing is, the car was used by gangsters to deliver a substantial amount of money to a kingpin.
  • Larger than Life has the protagonist crossing the country with an elephant using various modes of transportation, including trucks, a train, and at one point riding on the elephant's back.
  • Little Miss Sunshine is about a family who travels across state lines and has various misadventures along the way, while trying to get to a beauty pageant in time for their daughter to participate.
  • In Mad Love (1995), a teenager busts his mentally ill girlfriend out of a psychiatric hospital, and they run away together by car.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road naturally, since it has 'road' in the title. The titular Max stumbles across a woman freeing the wives of the Bad Future's tyrant - and the majority of the story is them journeying across the desert in search of an Arcadia called 'The Green Place', while being pursued by aforementioned tyrant's army. As it's also an action movie, there's quite a lot of Car Fu.
  • Midnight Special drops you right into the middle of a father on the run with his empowered son - as they travel across Texas trying to escape both the FBI and a religious cult trying to worship the boy as The Messiah.
  • Monsters is primarily a road movie, where a journalist helps his boss's daughter get back home from Mexico. The Mexico in this location just so happens to be after an alien invasion.
  • The Muppet Movie, in which Kermit sets off from the swamplands of the American South on his way to Hollywood to become rich and famous, picking up all of his Muppet friends along the way.
  • My Favorite Blonde features a sexy British spy and the bumbling American comedian she gets entangled with (Madeleine Carroll and Bob Hope) traveling from New York to Los Angeles by train, bus, stolen plane, and stolen car, chased by Nazis the whole way.
  • My Name Is Emily is a rare Irish example. The eponymous Emily is a depressed teenager who, after her Disappeared Dad fails to send her an annual birthday card, convinces a school friend to drive across the country to break him out of his mental hospital. Overlaps with the Road Trip Romance of course.
  • Nathan's Kingdom is about an autistic man and his younger sister searching for a magical kingdom free from hunger, fear, and pain, mostly in the sister's truck.
  • National Lampoon's Vacation, in which Chevy Chase takes his family on a disastrous road trip from Chicago to Southern California to visit Wally World, a Captain Ersatz of Disneyland that's closed for maintence. The sequel, National Lampoon's European Vacation, is basically the same plot, but with the Griswolds in Europe instead. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Vegas Vacation avert this trope, however, as their Christmas vacation is not really a vacation at all, and they fly directly to Vegas in the other.
    • The sequel/reboot, Vacation, is revisiting the premise of the original from the perspective of Rusty and his family.
  • The Odd Way Home is about an autistic man and an abuse survivor traveling by truck to visit first his father, then hers.
  • Paul is about two bumbling nerds who are on their way to a Sci-fi convention to pitch a comic one of them's written, only to wind up picking up a Grey named Paul who escaped Area 51 and was trying to get to an area where he could contact his people to leave. Hijinks and an accidental kidnapping ensue.
  • Paper Moon: Moses and Addie Travel from Gorham, Kansas to Joplin, Missouri, conning people along the way.
  • Patay na si Hesus (in English, Jesus is Dead), follows a Filipino family in the Visayas region, in the central Philippines, on a roadtrip from Cebu to Dumaguete city, for the funeral of their father/husband, named Hesus.
  • Plan B: Most of the plot is Sunny and Lupe going to Planned Parenthood in another city for the Plan B pill, since the pharmacy near them won't issue it.
  • Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which is all about a businessman's frantic efforts to make it from New York to Chicago for Thanksgiving, while all kinds of bad luck and complications get in his way.
  • Poetic Justice: is about a hairdresser and a postal worker going on a trip from Los Angeles to Oakland alongside their two respective acquaintances. The trip ends up both destroying and creating relationships.
  • All of the Hope/Crosby Road to ... pictures, which always featured Bob and Bing as comic partners getting in various misadventures as they traveled from A to B.
  • Rain Man: After the Black Sheep brother finds out that he's been disinherited, with his late father having left all his money to an unknown older brother in an institution, he kidnaps the brother and goes off on a cross-country trip.
  • Rubin and Ed comically relates a trip made through Utah to give a man's deceased cat a proper burial.
  • Scarecrow has two oddballs hitchhiking and riding the rails from California to Pittsburgh, where they hope to start a car wash business.
  • Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird has Big Bird travelling to the fictional Ocean View, Illinois, to live with Dodo family, only to find he doesn't really fit in with the family, and flees to return to Sesame Street; at the same time, his friends embark on a journey to try and meet him half way.
  • The 1989 sci-fi movie Slipstream is a Road Movie with airplanes. A Loveable Rogue steals the prisoner from two Bounty Hunters and flies off with them in pursuit across a world changed by environmental disaster. Earthquakes have torn up all the roads so everyone uses a permanent world-encircling wind called the slipstream for long distance travel. Unfortunately it was marketed as a sci-fi action movie instead, causing it to flop.
  • Smoke Signals: Victor and Thomas go on a road trip to Phoenix to retrieve Victor's father's ashes and grow as people along the way.
  • A good chunk of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) is this, with Sonic and Tom hitting the road to San Francisco to recover Sonic’s rings while trying to stay one step ahead of Robotnik and the government.
  • The Sure Thing is a great example from The '80s, combining this with Quest for Sex, as a college student travels from the east coast to California in search of nookie with the eponymous "sure thing".
  • Thelma & Louise of course! The two women shoot a rapist and decide to flee the scene of the crime, and travel towards Mexico.
  • Tommy Boy follows Tommy and Richard's travels as they attempt to sell brake pads. Complete with singing along with the car radio, hitting a deer, and other events typical of the genre.
  • Trafic: Features the misdaventures of Jacques Tati's M. Hulot and his bumbling goof a truck driver, as the two of them try to haul a model car from Paris to Amsterdam, having all sorts of wacky adventures on the way.
  • Two-Lane Blacktop is about a cross-country race between two stoic street racers and a mysterious man with a Multiple-Choice Past. Along the way, a girl drifts between the two cars.
  • In Vampires vs. Zombies, a father and his allies are transporting his vampire-infected daughter to the vampire queen's hometown so they can stake her in her lair and hopefully destroy the curse. Unfortunately, the countryside is infested with zombies.
  • The Way Back (2010) is a Based on a True Story account of several prisoners who escaped from a Siberian gulag, and hiked all the way to India.
  • Weekend (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard is a satirical roadtrip in a World Gone Mad in which everything is Serious Business.
  • Who's Singing Over There? describes an eventful bus trip to Belgrade on the eve of the German attack on Yugoslavia during the 2nd World War.
  • Wild is a road movie on foot, as Cheryl Strayed goes on an 1100-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, on a voyage of self-discovery.
  • David Lynch's Wild at Heart is about a young heiress (Laura Dern) and her ex-con boyfriend (Nicolas Cage) driving across America, trying to get away from her overprotective mom (Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's real-life mother) and her various henchmen.
  • Wild Boys of the Road: Three teenagers stuck in The Great Depression go on a harrowing journey from middle America to Chicago and thence to Cleveland and New York, scrounging for food and trying to avoid arrest and/or assault.
  • Wild Strawberries is a relatively rare European example. 78-year-old professor Isak must travel from Stockholm to Lund to receive a special award in recognition of fifty years as a medical doctor. He meets many people and sees places along the way that make him think about his life and what to do with the time he has left.
  • The Wizard has elements of this, as Corey (Fred Savage) takes his (supposedly) autistic brother Jimmy from the home he was put in, and they both run away to "California", where Jimmy competes in a video game tournament at Universal Studios Hollywood.
  • The Yellow Handkerchief has three lonely strangers hitch-hiking together through post Hurricane Katrina Louisiana, and slowly becoming friends over the course of the trip.
  • Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni has two plots. One guy joyrides a plane out of Los Angeles and flies over the desert, near Death Valley, and the other plot is a girl riding to Phoenix to be with her boss. Their paths intersect midway, but the story is mostly the girl's trip from Los Angeles to a corporate retreat in Phoenix.
  • Zombieland is pretty much a Road Movie set after the Zombie Apocalypse. Initially, Columbus is looking to get to Columbus, Ohio to find his estranged parents (mostly for want of anything else to do) and the girls are going to Pacific Playland. Tallahasee is mostly just in it for the zombie killin' (and the Twinkies). Halfway through, Columbus finds out his parents are very probably dead already, and once the climax at Pacific Playland is over, the end of the movie seems to signal the four of them starting their Walking the Earth.

    Literature 
  • Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may qualify, in that while Huck and Jim didn't go "across" the country, they did journey down the Mississippi River from the North to the South on a crude raft, with plenty of perils (particularly for Jim in the Antebellum South).
  • Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon is a nonfiction chronicle of the author travelling around the US in his camper-outfitted van on back roads (highways that were often colored as narrow blue lines on old gas-station maps), visiting many obscure or idiosyncratic small towns, in the 1970s.
  • Borgel is about a kid and his uncle driving through various locations along The Interstate through Time-space-and-the-other. They only develop their goal of seeing the Great Popsicle about halfway through, and Uncle Borgel isn't very committed to it.
  • The Cal Leandros book Roadkill features the brothers and Robin on a road trip to try to stop a figurative walking plague bomb.
  • The Canterbury Tales has as its framing device a group of pilgrims sharing stories to pass the time on a long journey from London to Canterbury.
  • Carry On's sequel, Wayward Son, sees the main characters dealing with their Happy Ending Override. The main character, Simon, is depressed and his relationship with his boyfriend, Baz, is on its last leg because of it. Penelope believes a change of scenery might do them good and pushes them to travel to America and then make a road trip from Chicago to San Diego, something Simon always dreamed of.
  • Carson Crosses Canada: The plot of the book is that Carson the dog and Annie, his owner, are taking a cross-country road trip across Canada to visit Annie's sister, Elsie.
  • A portion of the plot in Cigarette Girl consists of Soeraja's sons, Tegar, Karim, and Lebas, travelling across Java in search of the titular "cigarette girl".
  • Dancing Aztecs: Jerry spends most of his scenes in the second half of the novel following (and falling in love with) Bobbi after she leaves her husband and is driving out of the country.
  • ''Dashing Through The Snow" is a romance novel about a man and a woman who share the last rental car available to get her home for Christmas/him to a job interview (although he's also an FBI agent tailing her) as they run into increasingly improbable plot twists. This was also made into a Hallmark movie.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
    • The Long Haul is about the family's (disastrous) summer road trip.
    • The first third or so of The Deep End is about a road trip the Heffleys go on before sticking with the RV park for the remainder of the plot.
  • The Dreamside Road becomes a road trip story after the first arc. Once the story leaves Nimauk, the focus shifts to finding the Island Hidden at the International Dateline and all of the many stops on the way there.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both the book and the film.
  • The Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honour Guard features the main characters as part of a convoy to retrieve a sacred relic from a distant location.
  • Generation Kill is effectively described as a combination of this genre with a war movie, as it deals with the members of Marine Recon driving through Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
  • The second book of The Girl from the Miracles District is basically a road trip novel about Nikita's and Robin's journey from Wars to Iben's household and what happens on the way.
  • The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joads, a family of tenant farmers displaced from Oklahoma journeying to California where work is said to be plentiful.
  • Two of John Green's books include a road trip:
    • In An Abundance of Katherines, Colin and Hassan take a road trip south from their home in Chicago after graduating high school and (in Colin's case) getting broken up with. They end up in a small town in Tennessee where most of the story takes place.
    • Towards the end of Paper Towns, Quentin, Ben, Radar, and Lacey take a road trip from their home in Orlando to upstate New York to try to find Margo.
  • In Keith Robertson's Henry Reed's Journey Henry, his best friend Midge and her parents travel across the continental US.
  • The Horse and His Boy, the third book in The Chronicles of Narnianote  spends the bulk of its plot on the road. A talking Narnian horse persuades a Calormen slave to help him ride north to free Narnia. Along the way they meet another Narnian horse and her mistress trying to do the same.
  • According to How to Survive a Horror Movie, only three things can happen when you go on a road trip in a horror movie:
    1. Your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you're 'rescued' by a stranger who promptly butchers and eats you.
    2. You accidentally run someone over, decide to hide the body, and spend the rest of the movie slowly being picked off like scabs.
    3. You safely arrive at your destination... only your destination is a log cabin the middle of nowhere.
  • I Am David has a young boy being helped escape from a concentration camp and essentially being directed in a hike all the way from Germany to Denmark on his own. He eventually realises he's being directed to the home of his birth mother.
  • In the Midst of Winter: Richard, his colleague and tenant LucĂ­a and Evelyn brave a blizzard so they can go to a remote location to Dispose Of A Body that Evelyn found in the trunk of her employer's car.
  • Judy's Journey is a sort of juvenile Grapes of Wrath, being a story of a ten-year-old girl and her family who are forced to become migrant farm workers after they are evicted from Papa's work as a sharecropper. They travel from Alabama to Florida and back up into New Jersey, living in a tent, enduring the hardships of life as migrant laborers and meeting many people and having experiences along the way.
  • Nevada, the plot revolves around the main character's, Maria Griffiths, Road Trip to Nevada.
  • The Odyssey, in a way. It's basically about a king and his men on their journey home from war. By sea, of course.
  • On the Road. Jack Kerouac's adventures constitute a long succession of road trips.
  • The Road, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and film starring Viggo Mortensen about a boy and his father following an abandoned highway After the End.
  • The Someday Birds has an autistic boy, his three siblings, and their babysitter Ludmila travelling in a camper from California to Virginia to visit the kids' brain-damaged father.
  • The Stand turns into an After the End version of this, as the characters make harrowing journeys to either the rallying place for the protagonists (Boulder, CO) or the rallying place for Satan and his antagonists (Las Vegas, of course).
  • Stranger Than Fanfiction: Four friends decide to spend their last summer together before leaving for separate colleges on one. They plan to hit up the world's biggest rubber band ball, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Lewis And Clarke museum, the Mark Twain National Forest, the Bundy and Claire jailhouse, the UFO Observation Tower, Dinoworld, the Petrified Forest, the Arizona Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, and ending at the Santa Monica Pier, followed by touring the Wiz Kids set on the Sunshine Studios lot in Hollywood, California.
  • The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus follows the three main characters traveling from New York City to San Francisco. On foot. The journey takes months, and is quite physically difficult on the one living member of the trio. (The other two are ghosts.)
  • Why We Took the Car is about two 14-year old boys' journey in a 'borrowed' car from Berlin to Walachia.
  • Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance details a motorcycle journey by him and his son across the western US, along with a journey of philosophical and spiritual discovery.
  • Mr. Men: The 2018 book Mr. Men Road Trip has the Mr. Men and Little Miss characters hopping in a bus to take a tour of the United States.
  • Roys Bedoys: The plot of “Let’s Go on a Road Trip, Roys Bedoys!” is Roys and his family going on a road trip to a dinosaur theme park.
  • Stalin's Nose by Rory Maclean has the author and his aunt (and her pet pig) taking a road trip in a Trabant through Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's also a journey into the past and the moral compromises needed to survive under fascism and communism.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Due to a blockade, Marcus and Dr. Franklin leave Babylon 5 and embark on a Type 2 on board a slow freighter to Mars in order to meet with La RĂ©sistance.
  • The original Battlestar Galactica sent crew members on Type 3 trips in a great many episodes. The reimagined series was a little more restrained about it.
  • Billy the Exterminator: Season 4 has Billy and Ricky visiting various new locales, such as Phoenix, Chicago and Florida, to deal with different threats, such as javalinas.
  • An episode of The Drew Carey Show has the main cast piling into the Buzz Beer van and travelling to New York in an attempt to sell the beer outside a baseball game.
  • Frontier Circus: In "Journey From Hannibal", Casey has to pick up an elephant from Hannibal, Missouri and deliver it to the circus in Bismarck, Dakota Territory.
  • Throughout the series, The Golden Girls take quite a few road trips of the type 2 variety. Many become problematic due to the shortcomings of the person who planned the trip themselves without taking into consideration the needs of the other members of the group. Others are interrupted by natural circumstances, such as inclement weather.
  • Gold Rush!: Each season opens with a type 1a trip that delivers the miners to their gold mine in the slowly thawing far north. A few low-grade secondary type 1a trips are undertaken during the course of the mining seasons in order to obtain more mining resources. (Loans, materials, machines and equipment)
  • I Love Lucy had a several-episode arc where Ricky got cast in a Hollywood movie, so Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred drive a Type 1a cross-country to get there, stopping in (in subsequent episodes) Ohio, Tennessee, Albuquerque (Ethel's hometown), before finally getting to Hollywood, where they meet (through several more episodes) tons of Celebrity Cameos.
  • JAG: This series has sent Harm on several road trips.
    • played with this one. Because Harmon Rabb is a trained fighter pilot, he flies to Cuba in one episode. He almost blows the actual mission.
    • Another episode has Harm and Mac, on their first mission together, driving into the desert to find the people who stole the US Constitution. Both are a bit cagey, as Harm can't help but notice that Mac looks just like a former lover of his who was murdered, and because Mac knows that the man who stole the Constitution is a family friend of hers.
    • Yet another episode has Harm, Mac, and Budd driving a rental car to the site of their next case, due to there not being enough money in the budget to buy them plane tickets. On the way, they end up at a Quantum Leap convention, complete with Bellisario addressing a group of fans.
  • The Love Boat: In an interesting twist on the trope, the job of the regular cast was to facilitate type 2 trips for the guest stars.
  • NCIS: Members of the NCIS crew are on a Type 2 international flight when an air marshal is found murdered.
  • One episode of the British comedy One Foot in the Grave had Victor and Margaret stuck inside their car in a traffic jam for the entire episode for a Type 1b.
  • Red Dwarf: Several Type 3s using the Starbug.
  • Roseanne follows Jackie and Roseanne on a trip to meet their father’s mistress when her existence is revealed upon his death.
  • Stargate-verse: When they aren't spending mere seconds using the Portal Network to gate between planets light-years apart, they eventually use a variety of starships. When there's only a few seconds of travel time, there's no time for plot. When travel takes days or weeks, plot has loads of time to develop.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Several different crew members took shuttles to get someplace the Enterprise wasn't going.
  • Post-Season 8 of Supernatural moves from a Walk the Earth format to the brothers and their companions settling into the Men of Letters Bunker and going on frequent monster-hunting road trips. One notable episode, "Baby", is shot entirely from their car's point of view and fills in the gaps not seen in standard episodes.
  • That '70s Show: The gang traveled out of town so the boys could check out a college.
  • Wings introduced the infamous Carlton Blanchard in one of these. Blanchard wins a contest where the prize is a trip anywhere. Because of how the description was written note , he uses the prize to visit his brother in the American Southwest and fight him for their father's pocket watch.
  • Mr. Bean takes a trip in one episode to a destination we never see him arrive at. He first has to pack for his trip, desecrating most of his belongings in the process so he can get them to fit in his small trunk, taking the first part of his trip by train and then going by plane. The train trip is a disaster when he gets distracted by another passenger's laughter and then throws his ticket out the window. The plane is more so a disaster when he has to deal with a boy and his motion sickness. Of note, both feature films are road trips. Both of the films are also road trips. The first film Bean is about him making a trip to the United States. In the second film, Mr. Bean's Holiday he wins a trip to Paris to attend the Cannes Film Festival.
  • The first season of The Detour chronicles the Parker family's road trip from Syracuse, New York, to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It turns out to be a last-ditch effort by patriarch Nate to get his job back.
  • The show Promised Land (a Spin-Off of Touched by an Angel) made this the entire concept of the series, with the Greene family traveling around the country to help people. Though they did settle into a community by the final season.
  • The ER episodes "Fathers and Sons" (Doug and Mark travel to California for the former to settle his dead father's affairs and the latter to visit his parents) and "Sailing Away" (Carter and Abby travel to Oklahoma to rescue her ailing mother).
  • The Victorious episode "Car, Rain & Fire" has Cat, Tori, and Jade travel to a dead actress's home so that Cat can pay her last respects to her. Turns out she wasn't dead, Cat just misread a headline to a news story about joining a new show.
  • Frasier had two episodes in its run where Frasier and company head out on a trip in Martin's RV. The first season had "Travels with Martin" where the whole gang travels up to Canada, only to discover Daphne doesn't have her green card yet and have to try and get back so she doesn't get in trouble. Season seven had "RDWRER" where Frasier, Martin, Niles, and Eddie travel cross country to a big party that's celebrating the turn of the millennium, but Hilarity Ensues when they arrive at a rest stop and Niles accidentally gets on the wrong RV.
  • Good Luck Charlie: The Christmas movie, Good Luck Charlie, It's Christmas! has this plot for Teddy and Amy, as during a planned flight to Palm Springs to visit Amy's parents for Christmas, the plane turns out to be overbooked, so Teddy volunteers to take a later flight in return for a free ticket, and Amy follows her refusing to let her daughter travel alone. However, when it turns out the next flight won't have them arrive until after Christmas, the two are forced to hitchhike by road to reunite with the rest of the family in time.
  • Young Sheldon: In "A Lobster, an Armadillo, and a Way Bigger Number", Sheldon, Dr. Sturgis, and Dr. Linkletter go on a road trip to the Super Telescope.
  • The first episode of Lovecraft Country follows Atticus, George, and Leti on a road trip through 1950's rural America. Due to the prevalent racism still being in full force, just surviving the trip becomes a harrowing experience.
  • "Old Wounds" from Yellowjackets feaures a road trip for all four of the original main adult characters.
    • Misty goes on with citizen detective Walter, seeking out to find Lottie's cult.
    • Natalie goes on a trip with Lisa, the girl from the cult that she stabbed in the second season premiere, and meets her controlling mother.
    • Shauna takes her daughter Callie out into the middle of nowhere to try to get some answers from her about where she's been going when claiming to be with her friends. In return, she ends up telling the truth to Callie about having killed Adam and Jeff having blackmailed the Yellowjackets.
    • Taissa goes on a trip, runs out of gas and ends up hitchhiking, eventually making her way to a store run by adult Vanessa.

    Music 
  • Havalina Rail Co.'s album America is a concept album about a road trip across the US, with each song corresponding to a different area traveled through. The back cover of the album has a map depicting the route traveled.
  • Ninja Sex Party's song, aptly titled Road Trip, features Danny Sexbang and Ninja Brian going on a Type 1b road trip so that Danny can avoid a meaningful relationship with a girl he is dating. The trip (and song) revolves around Danny having sex across the nation (with various sex-related puns based on state and city names) until they reach California, at which point Ninja Brian kills a man for his yacht, and the duo travels around the world (continuing with the sex puns, this time using country names). The pair board a rocket so that Danny can bang "hot alien sluts", and the song ends when Danny leaves the rocket and is killed by rapid depressurization (he forgoes his spacesuit, as he is "way too horny").
  • "Its My Mother and my Father and My Sister and the Dog" by Barry Louis Polisar is about a family going on a long car trip to visit relatives, and the chaos that happens throughout the journey, especially in the car. The protagonist gets into a fight with his two little brothers, his sister cries and joins in the fight, and the dog keeps on making a mess. At one point, the father gets so fed up with the chaos that he threatens to send the kids out the car to walk to their destination. The song doesn't end so much as it fades out while the chorus is being sung.
    We're going on a trip
    And we're riding in the car,
    We've been driving all day it seems.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic's The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota tells the story of a family on a three day trip to see the titular tourist trap. Notably, the journey is actually extremely pleasant. Even when the father's camera is stolen by a homeless man and thrown out of the attraction for getting too emotional, he looks on the bright side and the family is excited to come back the next year.

    Pinballs 
  • Red & Ted's Road Show has its titular protagonists traveling across America, wreaking havoc along the way.
  • World Cup Soccer had the player progressing through the cup in different locales in the U.S. (matching those of the 1994 World Cup, which the game was made to promote).
  • The much-maligned Vacation America was all about this.

    Radio 
  • Adventures in Odyssey has two mini-arcs involving road trips. One is Connie and Joanne going to Washington D.C., and another is Eugene and Bernard.
  • Our Miss Brooks has the episode "Game at Clay City."

    Theater 
  • The Thornton Wilder play Theatre/The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is about a family taking a car trip to visit their oldest daughter, who has just had a baby.
  • Similarly to in the book, much of Percy Jackson and the Olympians plays out as the main trio treks across the country to Los Angeles. There's even an obligatory upbeat travel montage.
  • In the musical Violet, the title character travels by Greyhound bus from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with several stops along the way.
  • The comedy Leaving Iowa contains a road trip within a road trip. As columnist Don Browning drives across the Midwest trying to find a suitable place for his father's ashes, he remembers the summer driving vacations that Dad would take them on with all their stresses, frustrations, and near-death experiences of trying to dodge semis while passing traffic. Dad's long-ago destination (Hannibal, Missouri) is never actually seen in the play; the trip itself and how it changes Don is the point.

    Video Games 
  • 80s edutainment game Are We There Yet? is about the Mallard family's quest to visit two usually-obscure tourist attractions in each of the fifty states.
  • Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place on the road, with four heroes seeking to keep hope alive in a world going straight to hell.
  • Death Road to Canada is a road trip game that takes place during the Zombie Apocalypse. Alongside fighting zombies, dealing with bandits or rescuing survivors, your party members will have to deal with mundane things like figuring out who farted in the car.
  • The Rockwell Pursuit mod for Fallout: New Vegas revolves around a trip from Nevada to a research facility in Vermont.
  • Final Fantasy XV uses this, with protagonist Noctis setting out on a road trip with his True Companions to recover the stolen Power Crystal that keeps their kingdom alive.
  • Get In The Car, Loser! is a Road Trip Plot fused with the plot of your standard RPG - a party goes on a journey to defeat a recently revived ancient evil, they just happen to have a nice car.
  • Jalopy sees the game's protagonist drive through Eastern Europe shortly post-Glasnost with his uncle on a trip said uncle took in his youth. The game's title comes from the vehicle acquired for the trip: an Expy of the Trabant, which will cause its fair share of complications.
  • The Oregon Trail is an edutainment game about a family in the mid-nineteenth century crossing America to get to Oregon.
  • The Thule Trail is an Oregon Trail parody made in Flash, which has a typical modern Road Trip Plot.
  • Persona 5 Strikers features the Phantom Thieves on a Busman's Holiday around Japan, taking an RV to different cities where they enter the Metaverse to combat Shadows and take back the stolen Desires of the people in those cities.
  • Road 96 has you travelling across for over a thousand and a half miles across the game setting of Petria via a number of means while meeting interesting characters and falling into various situations as you ultimately try to get to the border and maybe help overthrow the oppresive regime of the country.
  • Road To Guangdong, an Indie game where you're the matriarch of a family in 1990s China bringing your family on a road trip back to your ancestral home in Guangdong Province (well, duh) to attend an unexpected funeral. That's pretty much the game's entire plot.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters: The SNES version has stages all over... what is probably supposed to be the United States.
  • WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$: In their chapter, Dribble and Spitz are asked by the player's avatar to be taken to the harbor during a rainy night. Winning the microgames symbolizes Dribble overcoming the difficulty of driving across the road during night while the downpour is ongoing. At the end, the taxi drivers manage to get their customer to the destination... and then that person is shown to be a merperson. Watching them depart to the vast sea is heartwarming for the drivers... until they realize that the merperson didn't pay them!

    Visual Novels 
  • In Daughter for Dessert, the protagonist and Amanda take a car trip to Whiskeyville. Apart from their main object (to fix their jukebox), the trip proves very eventful, with the sexual tension between the two of them reaching a tipping point, and with the two of them meeting Lily for the first time.

    Web Animation 
  • Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "road trip", Strong Bad and the Cheat attempt to go on a Type 1a road trip, but end up getting locked in the car with no way to start it for the duration of the episode, turning it into a Type 1b.
    Strong Bad: And that was our road trip. Or, more accurately our car trip, since we didn't go on any roads. Or, even more accurately, our car, since we didn't go on any trips either.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • Chakona Space: Plenty of interstellar type 2 and 3 trips.
  • A minor plot in Volume 3 of Simple Complications is Ted and Lyle going on a roadtrip. It's mostly just used for one off jokes in between the more serious storyline that took over that volume.
  • NeoScum turns into this by Episode 12, when the crew decides to run away from their problems in Chicago and Minneapolis and drive to California, making pit stops and enemies all along the way.

    Web Videos 
  • While the first Chris and Scottie's Road Trip (made by the same man behind The Irate Gamer) was a World Tour, the second installment is focused on the US instead.
  • Find The Alleged Car. Go on road trip with it. Break down multiple times and hack together fixes using absolutely sketchy methods and whatever the hell is lying around for parts. Use said Alleged Car for something it never was meant to, most likely failing at it in a photogenic and hilarious manner. Congratulations, you just made an episode of Roadkill!
  • TableTop: Invoked in the Dragon Age episode, where the party members joke that they're basically the cast of an '80s road trip movie: Thinly needs to get laid, Keegan is "trying to make up for the football thing", Fonzor is there to make out with chicks, and Gorek just wants to go home.
  • In the summer of 2022, good friends and fellow YouTubers Ted Nivison and Eddy Burback set out to visit and eat at every single Rainforest Cafe in the United States (and Canada). One year later, in the summer of 2023, they set out on a second excursion, this time to visit every single Margaritaville in the US and Canada. The two end up experiencing many of the classic road trip experiences, visiting bizarre and unique roadside attractions, dealing with car malfunctions, racing against the clock, and, in Eddy's case, slowly going mad.

    Western Animation 
  • The Adventure Time episode "Thanks for the Crabapples, Guiseppe", where Ice King and some of his fellow wizards hop on a van and take a trip to Big Butt Rock. They never reach their destination because they accidentally drive the van into the lake.
  • American Dad!: "Independent Movie" is a Homage and Affectionate Parody of this kind of movie, and uses this kind of plot, since it's a rather popular subject for independent American cinema, with Steve and his friends driving through the country so Snot can be in his estranged father's funeral.
  • Amphibia: The first several episodes of Season 2 are about Anne and the Plantars on the road heading towards the Amphibian capital city Newtopia and their misadventures along the way. After spending several episodes in the city, their return trip then consists of a single episode before they get back.
  • In an episode of Arthur Arthur and his family are taking a vacation to the beach. Arthur just wants to go to camp all by himself (and with his friends) but his family has to keep reminding him of how fun things can be. Even though things turn out bad at first, it winds up being a perfect vacation.
  • Being Ian: A two parter season finale has Ian and his family crossing the country so Ian can take part in an amateur film competition that is being judged by his idol. It becomes an in-universe example when he loses the movie he was going to submit and edits the footage he got of his family during their trip there to make a road trip independent movie as his entry.
  • In one episode of Chowder, a simple delivery turned into one of these, much to Chowder's joy. Unfortunately, they were delivering explosive fruit.
  • The third Danny Phantom Made-for-TV Movie, Reality Trip, doubled as this when the titular hero and his friends had to travel cross-country to obtain three magic gems.
  • Daria: "The Road Worrier" sees Daria and Jane take a road trip with Trent and Jesse to go to Alternapulooza. It ends up being a Type 1b, but Daria and Trent do get some "quality time".
  • Family Guy seems to have gone on more than one with their "Road To..." episodes.
  • The Flintstones: have gone on a variety of different Road Trips.
  • One Futurama episode, "Bendin' in the Wind" where they follow Beck in a VW bus is a Type 1a.
  • Gravity Falls has "Roadside Attraction" in which Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Candy, Grenda and Soos go on a statewide road trip, which includes sabotaging Stan’s rival tourist traps, Dipper learning to talk to girls and giant spiders.
  • The Phineas and Ferb episode aptly titled "Road Trip" is kind of a subversion of Type 1a: The entire episode takes place while the family is coming home from a road trip.
  • Milo Murphy's Law episode "Family Vacation" sees the Murphys on one of these, complete with a song.
  • The House of Mouse short "Daisy's Road Trip" has Daisy inviting herself on a road trip with Mickey and Minnie. She spends much of the trip driving them insane.
    "AARDVARK CROSSING!"
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Several trips happen in the show:
    • "Over a Barrel" may count as a Type 2, with the Mane Six and Spike taking a trip by train to Appleloosa.
    • "Pinkie Apple Pie" definitely counts as Type 1a, with Pinkie Pie tagging along on a trip with the Apple family to see a distant relative who might hold the key as to whether or not Pinkie really is a distant cousin of Applejack.
    • "Road to Friendship" is another clear-cut Type 1a, focusing on Trixie and Starlight going on a road tour to take Trixie's magic show to Saddle Arabia, while facing issues such as difficult terrain, the cramped confines of Trixie's wagon, inns with no vacancies and mounting irritation with each other.
  • 101 Dalmatians: The Series has the three-part series finale "Dalmatian Vacation".
  • Rocko's Modern Life: In "Road Rash", Heffer talks Rocko into going on a trip to see a tourist attraction called Phlegm Rock before it's closed down. Hijinks ensue, ranging from the struggle to find a decent motel, to having to ask for directions from easily-distracted locals, to Rocko trashing their motorcycle trying to stop the tape player and having to complete their trip in a hot-dog-shaped car Heffer wins in a contest, to an encounter with some surprisingly-friendly bikers.
  • The Sonic Boom episode "Planes, Trains and Dude-Mobiles" has Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles going on a road trip to participate in a concert. Despite the number of bathroom breaks, tourist trap stops, and a run-in with the police, they make it to their destination. Only to find that their concert isn't for another month.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants had a few vacation-themed episodes during the eighth season.
    • In "A SquarePants Family Vacation" SpongeBob is bringing Patrick along on his family vacation to a water park but the two get lost along the way.
    • In "Walking the Plankton" Plankton and his wife go on a cruise but it is actually party of a plan to steal the Krabby Patty formula.
    • In "Mooncation", SpongeBob tags along with Sandy on her vacation to the Moon.
    • Lastly, in "Mr. Krabs Takes a Vacation" SpongeBob tags along with Mr. Krabs & Pearl on a vacation to the Bikini Bottom Mint, much to Pearl's disappointment.
  • The Simpsons:
    • In "Bart on the Road", Bart and some of his friends take Type 1 in order to visit a world fair that turns out to have closed years ago, making this Type 1b.
    • In "We're on the Road to D'ohwhere", Homer takes Bart on a road trip to a motivational camp across the country due to incident in school and was on a "no fly list" in the airlines.
    • In "The Road to Cincinnati," Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers head on an 800-mile road trip to Cincinnati so Chalmers can deliver the keynote speech at an educators' convention.
  • A series of Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Summer Vacation has Hamton's family take a Type 1a to Happy World Land, with Plucky tagging along. They take the monorail around one time, then go home.
  • One of the final episodes of Nickelodeon's Doug has a Type 1 with Doug's family off to see the Painted Gorge, which gets sidetracked by several stops to visit which turn out to be tourist traps, followed by the car getting stuck in the mud and requiring everyone to get out and push it free.
  • The Loud House:
    • "The Sweet Spot" has Lincoln (and then his sisters) vying to sit in the "sweet spot", the only good seat in Vanzilla, for a road trip the following day. The trip turns into type 1b before it even begins, as it gets cancelled when the kids' violent brawl for the seat completely destroys Vanzilla.
    • A later episode, "Tripped!" features an actual road trip. The Loud family have worked hard to save money for their family vacation to the Weeping Willow Resort & Lodge on Lake Michigan, but as they drive to their destination, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Vanzilla breaks down and later accidentally ends up on a car carrier, the Loud family attend an open mic night to raise money for new transportation, they encounter a prisoner when they accidentally get on a prison bus, and Leni made egg salad sandwiches weeks ahead of the road trip, which make the family sick.
  • The hour-long special Tiger Family Trip from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood premiered in May 2017. The double-length story "Tiger Family Trip" is only the first part of it and the part the contains the actual road trip. The rest of the special is spending time at Grandpere's and vacationing, followed by the Boring Return Journey that is only depicted on-screen in about a minute or so. Given the Edutainment Show aspect of the program, "Tiger Family Trip" focuses on strategies for making a long road trip bearable for both youngsters and their parents, one of which is to take breaks every so often at someplace like a play park so the kids aren't just spending the entire trip cooped up in a vehicle.
  • Parodied in The Crumpets episode "Road Stories" where Granny and Caprice embark on a world road trip for a reality TV show, and Granny decides to drive the van to the forest near their house and secretly fake their visits to world destinations using a backdrop.
  • Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! has the episode "Wubbzy's Wacky Journey", in which he and his friends embark on a trip to Wuzzleburg after he previously wins the Wubb Girlz' Talent Contest in Wuzzleburg. However, Walden refuses to let anyone stop at fun places along the drive to Wuzzlewood. Hilarity Ensues as expected when Wubbzy sneaks off the Wubb-Mobile to spend time at Wacky World, bumping into the Wubb Girlz. As his friends arrive there and find out, they suggest using the Wubb Jet to arrive in Wuzzlewood on time for the rehearsal which, after some time enjoying rides, they then do.

    Real Life 
Older Than Radio:
  • In 1888, Bertha Benz was convinced that her husband's newly invented motorcar was much more than a technological curiosity and had huge potential to revolutionize transportation. So she took the car that previously had only been used for short engine tests on the factory grounds and went on a road trip to visit her mother with her two sons. Even though they had to deal with various complications like running out of fuel (a pharmacy was able to help) and engine failure, they still made the 100 km trip in a single day. A journey with a horse carriage would have been a trip of at least three days. She also came up with the idea for a multi-speed gearbox, which would allow the car to be driven slowly uphill or quickly across flatter terrain.
  • In 1903 Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson bet he could drive from San Francisco to his home in Vermont. After purchasing a 20hp Winton automobile and hiring a mechanic to ride with him, they set off. The journey would take three months. It's regarded as America's First Roadtrip.
  • If you have a car or a reasonable amount of disposable income - The road goes ever on...
  • This has been a major sticking point in getting people to embrace electric cars. Before lithium-ion batteries, their range was severely limited, and before high-voltage DC charging (such as Tesla's Superchargers), recharging took several hours (if one could even find a place to plug in while on the road). Even people who rarely if ever drive long distances tend to be hesitant to deny themselves that option. Things have gotten better, but many people still associate "electric" with "useless for road trips".

Alternative Title(s): Road Trip Episode, Road Movie

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