The family road trip is highly under appreciated. Flying somewhere, having a week of relaxation and fun at a great location, has its charm. But the sense of discovery, interaction, and togetherness of a family roadtrip can't be matched. It used to be a rite of passage to have a family road trip -- kinda like bumming with a backpack across Europe as a teenager or young adult. Travel for the sake of travel is becoming a lost art in this country. Yes, I spent $400 in gas over the last two weeks, and enjoyed every dollar of it. The charming, family-run, simple b&b's, the green mountains of Vermont, the white mountains of New Hampshire, the coast of Maine, as well as friendly Canadians in Toronto and Montreal, made the driving time all worth it. Mostly, amid the gorgeous scenery and friendly towns, we reconnected with family stories somehow never told. My teenage daughter was full of questions of my life as a teenager and in college, questions she may have never asked and never heard the answer to. We shared music and conversation, not dvds and not ipod music --there is plenty of time for individual video escape at home to waste the time on a road trip with electronics that dominate our lives the rest of the time. The last similarly long family road trip was 2000 miles in Scandinavia, not New England, when the kids were four and eight years old. I remember my friends saying, "my kids would have killed each other next to each other for so long." And I thought, "My kids never get along so well as when forced to be together and share their lives on a road trip."