Sunday, May 4, 2014
Hardships in Traveling
As we have recently read, the Joads lost their grampa to a stroke and their dog to a car while on the road to California. Travel in previous centuries and decades seems to have been more perilous than it is now. Do we face some of the same hardships on the road, or different ones? What has changed in recent years that helps negate some of the hardships of traveling for us?
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I believe that a lot has changed since the Dust Bowl. The automotive industry has made several great innovations in the past decades. Traveling is easier than it has ever been. Plane tickets are affordable, cars are reliable, and the technology just keeps on progressing. Plane tickets were something reserved for the upper class just a few decades ago. Now, the middle class can usually afford plane tickets. People are traveling more than they ever have in the past. This is due to the ease of traveling. One can hop on a plane from Los Angeles to New York and arrive in about five hours. Even cars have made significant strides in technology. It is not unheard of a car going for 200,000+ miles. Cars are more secure than they have ever been despite us traveling at much higher speeds. When we do experience hardship on the road, help is usually just a phone call away thanks to our cell phones. While we still do have some hardships while traveling, they are not nearly as extreme as the ones during the dust bowl.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say that people travel more now than in the past, it makes me think about how during the Joads' time, they simply were traveling because that had no other choice. They were traveling to move their lives and find a new home. To them it was a hardship and a burden in which they had to face many other trials on top of the big load. Today, we have the luxury of traveling to take a break, go on vacations, or find more opportunities outside of where we live. When we go on the many little trips we take, it is also unlikely that we will face even half of the troubles the Joads face during their trek to California. Even though it doesn't seem fair, they would not have known anything different at the time. They used the opportunities they had and today, we do not have any that the future holds and we are doing just fine.
DeleteTravel options are definitely more available to us now. We obviously are not only restricted to driving our little cars 35 mph across the US. Technology in cars has improved to allow us much faster speeds to get to our destinations quicker as well as giving us more comfortable amenities such as heating and air conditioning. Besides just car technology, other means of travel have also become accessible to the public. Air travel is preferred by some, as it is definitely the quickest way to make it where one is going. Even travel by train is effective. Even though this had more popularity in the past, it still today works well to get from one place to the other. Trains are especially important in Europe. There are so many railways within each country as well as making it easy to get from one to the next. But whichever way one chooses to travel by, the environments are much better than in the 30's. With all the new technology cars today have touch screen radios, DVD players, automatic doors, and so much more. This makes travel with children easy because it keeps everyone entertained. The options for our generation is endless with the technology. It will be amazing to see how much further it will take us.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many ways to travel. The destinations are endless thanks to today's technologies and advancements. However, just because traveling has become so much easier, does not mean that people travel wherever they want all the time. Of course, there are a lot of reasons for this, such as money and time. Why though, might some people choose not to travel if they have time and the money to do so?
DeleteThings also get much cheaper when they are produced in mass quantity. This is the reason that the motor car became so popular in our society. When the production cost goes down, almost every consumer benefits. Planes and cars are made in large quantities. This allows the average person to be able to afford to ride on one of them. Railways do have a major role in Europe. This is not the case in the United States as much though. This is partly due to cities becoming more spread out because of the motor car. The car has really shaped what America is today.
DeleteTraveling definitely has changed since the time of the Dust Bowl. Then, traveling was in desperation. They traveled with the sorrow of leaving their homes and the hope of finding a new beginning. Now, travel is majorly used for pleasure. This is because, as Colton has said, in today's age, it is extremely easy to do so compared to the disabilities of the past. Money is and always has been an issue. Although it is fairly inexpensive for many to travel today, having little money can be restricting. For those of the Dust Bowl, money was extremely scarce, which meant traveling was much more difficult than it otherwise would be. Besides the issue of money for travel, hope is another similarity between traveling in the age of the Dust Bowl and traveling in today's age. During the Dust Bowl, people traveled with an immense amount of hope within their families. They hoped for something new. I think that people travel today also because they have a kind of hope to find something new, whether it is to make a new memory, to make a new home, or to make a new discovery.
ReplyDeleteI agree that in the time of the Joads and the Dust Bowl that they had no other choice to travel to a new location in the search of jobs and much more. In today's society I feel that we make take traveling for granite and not really understand how fortunate we are to live in a time that it takes only couple of hours to travel from one town to the next. While the Joads it took days to travel from place to place and many hardships endured all through out their travels.
DeleteVirginia, I enjoyed how you looked at the hardships as emotional while i looked at the hardships as something physical. I did not consider the desperation the Dust Bowl refugees were facing when they were forced to leave their homes to find work. I also did not consider the false hope the travelers were filled with when traveling to California. I think that people today are faced with the same emotional hardships as back then, but not the same physical hardships.
DeleteI feel over the years traveling has changed tremendously through the production of bigger and better cars but also in the roads presented and the rest stops along the way. With this being said I feel this pushes people of today to travel more often because it allows for such an easier access of traveling. Hardships of today are nothing compared to the past. In the past some include death, major sickness, or loss of everything. Where as in today death may occur in an incident of a car wreck which most of the time is rare and other hardships include flat tires or running out of gas and even than is rare appearing. I feel traveling is much easier now and that is why we do it so much more.
ReplyDeleteJeff I agree with you that the "bigger and better" cars have encouraged more people to travel. With more people on the road it forces the government to make better roads and so traveling has become much more available to everyone. It is so easy to jump in the car, and in 3 hours one can be 200 miles away. I agree that the hardships faced today are not as bad also. My truck just broke down on my last road trip and I thought it was the end of the world, but in the past they would have been worse-off had it happened back then.
DeleteI think that there will always be hardships in travel. Over the years, it is the way people deal with the hardships that have changed. Technology has also developed since the time that the Joads were traveling across America. Back then, if a tire went flat or fell off the truck, it was very difficult to fix the problem. Now, when there is a flat, a person can easily change it themselves or call AAA to come repair it. But, as technology has gotten more advanced, the accidents that can occur now are more deadly. A car crash at 75 miles per hour is much more deadly than a crash at 30 in the 1930s.
ReplyDeleteWell traveling has become so easy that everyone wants to do it. With more people traveling the safety precautions have to be raised and the standards for traveling are constantly improving. We still face difficulties while traveling today because bad things are going to happen in every aspect of life, but it is no where near as bad as it used to be. I just watched a movie on the Willie and Martin handcart companies who helped settle the west. They carried all their belongings in a handcart and the hardships they faced were so terrible. We have it pretty easy today with all of our means of transportation.
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