Are We There Yet?: A Modern American Family's Cross-Country Adventure

by Bill Lohmann and William H. Lohmann Jr.

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0963953176
• ISBN13: 9780963953179
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Hope Springs Press
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A great virtual journey

Wow! I didn't even know my computer could do that! Yes, I finally downloaded the e-version of your book and began playing around with it this afternoon. I hadn't realized that I could zip around your book through the internal links but also zip all over the country to learn about the sites you visited through external links. It's dizzying! But great fun.-- Michael Lund, author of the Route 66 Novel Series, including "Growing Up on Route 66"

The Swiss Family Lohmann

This is a wonderful book. It's a travel book, of course, but it's also a family relations book, an adventure book and, above all, a humor book. Bill Lohmann, working for one of those rare newspapers that rewards a reporter with imagination, convinced his editors to send him, his wife and his three children on a seven-week motor trip to California and back. It must have been a rare treat for readers of the Richmond Times-Dispatch to read his dispatches every few days, wondering what disaster might befall before the next report reached print. A lot of families might not have survived a social experiment like this. Lohmann's trip put the family through plenty of trials, but insofar as onew can tell no blows were struck and no one was left behind. Indeed, as Lohmann put it, good luck always seemed to follow bad. The family camped out in Yellowstone, where Lohmann professed himself greatly in fear of bears, without any sort of encounter with the local fauna. But upon pitching their tent on a Florida beach, every critter in the neighborhood came to examine them. Lohmann is a graceful writer with a fine, self-deprecating sense of humor that infuses every page. By the time they get back to Richmond, you feel as though you know his children very well. Buy this book, and read it one chapter a day.

Cross-Country Trip Is a Journey of the Heart

"One van, two parents, three children, seven weeks, 28 states, 10,000 miles": that's the summary of a cross-country trip writer Bill Lohmann and his family took in the first summer of the new millennium. That blurb only begins to summarize the great adventures Bill, wife Robin, and children Melissa, Alexandra and Jack had in the mother of all family vacations chronicled first in Bill's articles in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where I first read them, and now in his book Are We There Yet? This is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer. Lohmann as a reporter has covered Southern politics, religious fights and prison riots. But as fearless as he, I don't think he understood what he was getting into when he talked his editors into letting him take not just a two-week traditional family vacation but a seven-week odyssey in a conversion van named Big Blue, packed with everything three children could con their parents into letting them bring along. He didn't realize what sleeping five to a tent or even five in an occasional motel room could do to his constitution. But he and his family got a vacation they will never ever forget, and his Richmond readers got an account of America they hadn't seen since they last read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley or William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. Now the rest of the country can read about characters Lohmann discovered along the way, like Will Harbut, Man o'War's groom, dead like Man o'War since 1947. We can watch Mark McGwire slam batting practice home runs in St. Louis; sit in the stands at the Iowa field where "Field of Dreams" was filmed; become dude cowboys or cowgirls at the Western Pleasure Guest Ranch in Sandpoint, Idaho; ride along the "world's crookedest street" in San Francisco; peer at the stars in Yosemite National Park; stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona; ride a boat through a New Orleans swamp; see the Big Chicken, the mechanical bird looming over a KFC in Marietta, Ga.; and reminisce about our own family vacations. Inspired readers can even get cracking on their own adventures. Website addresses throughout the book and a "Looking Back" final chapter make vacation planning a snap. I recommend this book to those who were kids in the backseat of a car or wagon or van and to the parents who drove and navigated in front, and to all those others whose great family vacations are about to begin.

Family and fun

Bill Lohmann's wonderful "Are We There Yet?" is a must-read for anyone who appreciates life - and travel - with children. Anyone who has driven more than five minutes in a car with a child can relate to this book. With crisp detail, moving stories and side-splitting anecdotes, Lohmann takes readers along with him and his family on their excellent adventure across the country. This book is a great piece of writing that highlights family and fun and all the lessons learned by being together on the road. In reading "Are We There Yet," I felt like I was on the ride with the Lohmann family - and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Are We There Yet?

I highly recommend this delightful book about this unique family's cross-country adventures into the vacation highlights and gift shops of the lower 48 States.Travel with them as they tour familiar sites and out-of-the way stops, and answer the burning question of just how much dirty laundry can fit into the back of a conversion van, as well as read of their encounters with baby walleroos in Oregon and rascally bison in Montana. Sing with them as they stand on the corner of Winslow, Arizona and then as they make their way home.It's a wonderful book, and with its internet interactive links, will provide hours' of laughter and information about this wonderful country we call home.