The Lost Art of the Sunday Drive

My father had a particular way of announcing the Sunday drive. He did not announce it exactly. He would finish his after-church coffee, fold the newspaper, and say to no one in particular: "Think I might take a drive." And then everyone would get in the car, because that was how it worked, and off we went to wherever the road felt like going that afternoon.

We did not have a destination. That was the entire point. The Sunday drive, at its best, was an act of deliberate purposelessness in an era that was increasingly demanding purpose from everything. You drove to see what you would see. You stopped for ice cream if you passed a stand. You slowed down for cows. You turned left or right based on which way looked more interesting, and you always found your way home eventually because that was the other thing the Sunday drive taught you: the general shape of the world around you, the roads that connected things, the farms and forests and small towns you had lived beside for years without ever properly noticing.

The Golden Age of Going Nowhere

The Sunday drive as a cultural institution belongs specifically to the postwar era, though the impulse is older. When automobiles first appeared, driving itself was the novelty — wealthy families would take "touring" trips not to get anywhere but simply to experience the machine moving through space. As cars became affordable and ubiquitous, that pure pleasure of movement democratized into the Sunday afternoon family ritual that millions of Americans practiced from roughly 1945 to 1970.

The conditions were right in a way they had never quite been before and have not quite been since. Gas was cheap — pennies per gallon in real terms. Roads had improved enormously under the New Deal and postwar highway programs. Car ownership was nearly universal in middle-class households. And the culture had not yet fully reorganized itself around the idea that leisure time must be productive or at least efficiently scheduled. Sunday afternoon was loose time. The drive was what you did with it.

The Smithsonian has noted that the Sunday drive shaped the American landscape in ways we still live with: roadside stands, motor courts, the first drive-in restaurants, the logic of the scenic byway — all of these grew from the culture of people who drove for pleasure and stopped for whatever caught their eye.

What You Learned Without Trying

The Sunday drive was education disguised as entertainment, which is the best kind of education. You learned the landscape. You learned that the county road behind the cemetery connected eventually to the state highway that went through the next town, which meant that next town was closer than you thought. You learned the names of farms, the shapes of hills, the way the light hit the reservoir in late afternoon in October.

You also learned the interior landscape of your family. Conversation in a car is different from conversation in a house. Something about facing forward together, about watching the same road, loosens things. My father told me things on Sunday drives that he would never have said at the kitchen table — not secrets, exactly, just observations about life, about work, about what mattered to him. The car was a confessional that moved.

The 1973 Oil Crisis and the End of an Era

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 changed American driving permanently. Gas lines, odd-even rationing, fuel prices that quadrupled in months — all of it made the purposeless drive feel wasteful in a way it never had before. You drove to get somewhere. You drove for reasons. You did not drive just to drive.

This was a reasonable and necessary adjustment that also cost something real. The Sunday drive did not disappear entirely, but it retreated into a special occasion, a nostalgic gesture, rather than a weekly habit. When gas prices eased, the habit did not fully return. Other things had filled the Sunday afternoon — youth sports leagues, big-box shopping that required a car but provided no pleasure in the driving, eventually the internet and its infinite alternatives to looking out the window.

The Case for Reviving It

There is a National Scenic Byways program run by the Federal Highway Administration that designates roads for their cultural, historic, natural, and recreational significance — roads worth driving, in other words. There are more than 150 of them across the country. Most Americans have never driven most of them. Many have never driven any of them.

The Sunday drive does not need to be long or expensive or car-dependent. It needs only to be purposeless in the best sense: undertaken not to arrive somewhere but to be somewhere, moving, watching, noticing. An hour on a back road you have never taken. A detour through a town you pass on the highway but have never actually entered. A loop through the countryside that brings you home by a different route than you left by.