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Being a fan of travel ephemera, TSG was pretty excited to see this vintage Conoco "TourAide" guide at our local used book store. A competitor/alternative to AAA's TripTiks, TourAides came in a larger, spiral bound format with photos and descriptive essays. The "Prepared Especially for" imprint on the front cover was a nice touch.
The only thing we could find online about "Helen Georrgia" was a 1939 headstone listed at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma -- a fairly likely match considering the Bay Area origination of the trip. Of course there's no way of knowing how Miss Helen's trip to Atlanta went, but we hope she enjoyed her journey.
We had a heck of a time matching the exposure/colors on all the pages, so please excuse the inconsistencies. And the Dallas map didn't get rotated to portrait mode...drat! Oh well, consider it an imperfection made on purpose like the ones in Persian rugs.
NOTE: the individual pages can be inspected here: 1936 Conoco Touraide Guide
2 comments:
That's pretty interesting. Some of the indicated roads (orange highlighter) sometimes branched to depict, I guess, an alternative way to get to a same point. I used AAA TripTix quite a bit back in the day, and those seem to me to be both more detailed (i.e., less likely to get you lost) and easier to use with their smaller footprint. This Conoco offering seemed to aspire to combine AAA TripTix with their travel guides that provided info about various places and which provided info about lodging and dining (along with ratings).
I too have used AAA TripTiks in the past and I almost (almost) prefer the paper map/tourbook days of travel planning. Even though route finding with today's tech is extremely convenient, google maps has led me down some pretty sketchy roads in the middle of nowhwere and pointed me to dead end streets more than a couple of times. I've been directed to get off the highway to take a frontage road for a mile and get back on at the next on ramp. Very frustrating, to say the least.
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