By Chris Welch,McClatchy Newspapers

In the 1970s, Larry Walde took his family of four on road trips in a pickup truck with a camper shell on the back.

“We didn’t have TVs or any of this high-tech stuff,” said Walde, 65-year-old retiree. “We’d just make up idiotic games like, ‘What would be worse, to slide down a giant razor blade or get stabbed seven times with a long sword?”‘ he said. “We could make something like that last for miles.”

Now his daughter, Maria Walde-Douglas, has two children, ages 4 and 9, and makes her own road trips in the family’s Ford Escape. When the license plate game gets boring, she pulls out a portable DVD player.

“That was a lifesaver,” she said. “They weren’t fighting, or saying ‘When are we going to get there?”‘

The family road trip is a national rite of passage, and even with skyrocketing gas prices, countless Americans will travel by car this summer, as families have done for decades. What has changed is the style in which we ride – and, some believe, the spirit of the road trip itself.

The changes in the American roadway are well documented. Regional differences have faded as interstates crisscrossed the land; in their high-speed wake, most mom-and-pop motels, cafes and truck stops have been replaced by chains.

Now, a similarly dramatic transformation is occurring inside the car. Where local AM radio stations once sufficed, a whole new world of entertainment has evolved. The Consumer Electronics Association reported in a recent study that 32 percent of American adults use DVD players in their vehicles, and that number is expected to increase to 37 percent in 2007.

About 10 percent of new vehicles sold nationwide have factory-installed DVD systems, primarily in minivans and SUVs. Millions of other traveling families listen to satellite radio and travel with handheld computer games, iPods and cell phones. That’s a far cry from counting cows.

Hal Rothman is a history professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas whose specialty is the American culture of travel. He said in-car entertainment has had a profound impact on the experience.

“Well, for one thing, parents yell at their kids a lot less,” he said. “But seriously, it has fundamentally changed the nature of the interaction in the family car. There’s a lot less front-to-back-seat communication, and kids remain in the world of youth culture on the trip instead of being exposed to the ideas and values that we presume were once transmitted.”

For those who traveled with their families in the precomputerized age, precious memories often are made up of the ways they came together to entertain themselves during 10-hour drives across the Dakotas or Nebraska. For others, those journeys recall endless miles of bickering and boredom.

Molly Magnani said she is grateful for the way technology has eased the difficulties of traveling with her large brood. She and her husband, David, have 4-year-old triplets and a 12-year-old son; they take road trips in a minivan outfitted with a 14-inch-screen DVD player in back.

“We needed one big enough so all the kids could see it, and we got headphones so my son can play PlayStation when the triplets are sleeping,” Molly Magnani said.

Magnani said her family drives to Colorado for ski vacations every year, just as her family did when she was growing up. Her parents drove through the night so the children would sleep instead of fight.

“We dreaded those long trips,” she said. “Now we go the whole way with virtually no complaining. It’s three or four movies, a couple of meals, and we’re there.”

As traveling parents, Scott and Carmen Schluter have taken the opposite track: They are uncomfortable with the idea of having a TV in the car. The couple has two daughters, ages 6 and 9. They returned in early June from a four-day trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota, during which the family played games and sang in the car, but watched no movies.

“It was a very conscious choice,” Carmen Schluter said. “We want our kids to be able to entertain themselves.”

For many families, that is easier said than done. Being able to call on a DVD as an instant baby sitter on the road is a seductive option.

“It’s clear that technology has changed family vacations,” said David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family. “The key is balance. Having kids watch the DVD player as part of a family trip makes sense. What we need to watch is that it doesn’t start to rob the family of valuable things, like telling stories and having a chance to connect.”

Outside the car, too

The changes inside the car are mirrored in changes taking place outside it. Roadside attractions must appeal to consumers accustomed to media stimulation.

Tom Diehl has worked at the Tommy Bartlett empire of tourist attractions in the Wisconsin Dells area for 40 years, and he’s tracked those changes closely.

“Today’s generation is totally different from the tourists of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he said of the multimedia savvy.

He said Bartlett’s mainstays – a water-ski show and an exhibition that used to be called Tommy Bartlett’s Robot World – have had to adapt to compete. Robot World was updated and renamed Tommy Bartlett’s Exploratorium.

“Twenty years ago, animated robots were enough,” Diehl said with a sigh. “Now it’s all hands-on activities.”

Diehl said the water show has had to add some glitz by tying in with popular themes, such as Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel.

“We’ve re-themed the show ‘The Pirates of Bartlett’s Bay,”‘ he said.

The road trip remains an integral part of the American experience. That desire to see the country from the highway is rooted in some very old traditions, said historian Adam Duncan Harris.

“The destination is often not the point of the journey; it is the journey itself that brings families together,” he said. “By reenacting the journeys of our ancestors even on a small scale in the minivan, we are tying into one of the most profound and long-lasting founding myths of American civilization.”

Harris said he isn’t convinced DVD players or iPods can significantly alter something so deeply ingrained in our culture.

That’s an idea that resonates with Larry Walde, who is planning summer road trips with his grandkids, and still loves reminiscing about cross-country odysseys with his two children.

“Those were the days before seat-belt laws,” he said. “The four of us would be up in the cab, or the kids would be in the (covered) back of the truck on sleeping bags. When we were headed out to Yellowstone, my son, who was 4 at the time, mooned me through the rear window just outside of Devils Tower. I laughed for 100 miles.”