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He's also spent a lot of time behind the wheel, so we had a little road trip chat and he shared some advice.ĭS: Great Smoky Mountains – the mountains and the foliage – because it was just such a different experience from Southern Florida, which is flat with beaches. He still spends time in front of the cameras across Texas as AAA's defacto automobile safety czar.
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Shupe's name may sound familiar to Central Texans, because before his AAA position, he spent time in front of cameras at a few local news outlets, including News 8 Austin. His family's trips would also begin in Palm Beach County, Florida, and he also studied at University of Florida, eventually landing gigs in Austin media. We were both given AAA memberships regularly for our birthdays as young adults. Turns out Shupe and I have a few more things in common. You knew you were going somewhere! When those trips were being processed, you knew this was a done deal, and off you go." How exciting it was to watch them stamp that arrow page after page. So when I got on the phone with Doug Shupe, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at AAA Texas, a big grin stretched across my face when he answered one of my first questions: "My dad’s family is from West Virginia," he told me, "and I remember as a child when we’d go get the TripTiks. The affable Doug Shupe, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at AAA Texas and veteran Austin news guy (photo by Phillip LeConte Photography) As he or she turned each page, unfolding each map layer, the clerk would stamp a red arrow showing the direction to go. Say what you will, but man, was I happy to have all those nerdy maps.)Īfter stacking the sections in the proper order, the whole thing would be run through one of those plastic comb binders and brought over for us to check. Also, 2) my trip through Cajun Country last month found me without phone signal on many an occasion. Do not breathe the words "relic" and "TripTik" in the same sentence around me, or I shall regale you with: 1) Everytime I bring a friend with me to a local AAA office, they marvel at how crowded the office is with folks in line to have them made. (Pausing here for my own personal ode to TripTiks: Sure, we live in the digital age, but I'd be the wrong person to argue the outdatedness of printed map media. The clerk would write down all the places we wanted to hit along the way, slap on one of those rubber thumb grips, turn around to face what seemed to me to be a massive wall of mail-sorting cubbyholes, each loaded with folded map sections, then deftly thumb out each section required to cobble together our totally customized flip book map for our trip: Our TripTik. Dad would always take me with him to the auto club and get me to tell the clerk our destinations.įor a number of years, this meant charting a course almost the entire length of Florida, up through the Deep South, across the Great Smoky or Blue Ridge Mountains, depending on our trajectory, over to Kentucky to see family on his side, passing through our nation's capital, and eventually landing in either New Jersey or Pennsylvania to spend time with my mom's side of the clan. The annual pilgrimage to the office of the American Automobile Association to acquire our summer vacation TripTik held the same excitement as that yearly trek to JM Fields or Sears to get a new lunchbox for the school year. After creating a nest for my mom in the backseat of our big ol' Bonneville, dad would plop my skinny little 7-year-old butt down in the passenger seat and put an atlas, a pile of maps, and a AAA TripTik on my lap, bark orders to buckle up, then ask, "OK, where’re we going? Tell me where to turn."ĭays before all that, we had to get our maps. Real family vacations, in my experience, took planning, too.