Real people, real trips.

That's what road trips is all about.

Road Trips provides a digital space for travelers to connect with other travelers and get a firsthand account of their experiences.

After recently relaunching their site, one of the owners talked to us about road tripping and how road trips works.

Road trips are for the longing in us that, you know, wants a little freedom, a little change of pace, and then we want to return to the lives that we love, you know, re-energized and with some new experiences and new ways of looking at things.

Americans especially, you know, we've always felt we've always waxed nostalgic about the road trip, you know, get your kicks on Route 66 and, you know, the country roads we want to sing about and go down.

Right.

So, you know, I think it's just a part of Americana.

And I do think after the pandemic, people were ready to get out of their houses and do some exploring.

So road trips is stories of the road captured and being told through social media websites.

Our newsletter we have actually a building very large community of people who are interested in road trips.

They love the romantic road trip, the freedom of thinking about getting out on the open road, and they also love sharing their own experiences with other people the way we decided to do it because we've always loved journals and diaries, you know, and things like that.

Autobiographies.

So we decided to organize the website like a shelf of journals so you can pull out a journal about Berea, you can pull out a journal about Henderson.

They're categorized by journals, by states first and by journals within the state.

And then when you open up the journal on the website, you'll see all the encounters that were had in that location.

We actually have group Facebook groups for all 50 states where people can share their information and those are such lively forums and they are so much fun.

The Kentucky Road Tours Facebook Group right now has over 130,000 people in the group.

And if somebody says, Hey, I want to take my eight year old man with Cave, what should I do other than a cave tour?

Literally 43 people will say, my nine year old and I did this and we loved it.

So there's tons of interaction in our groups.

North Carolina has over 10,000 people in that group.

Now.

Pennsylvania is growing.

Tennessee has thousands of people.

So, you know, these are these are emerging communities for people to interact.

I think it's a part of our human nature to want to share our experiences with others, to encourage them to, you know, go out and have a novel experience.

It can be a very endearing experience to road trip with someone.

And that's road trip.

Z By the way, according to a Deloitte travel study, seven out of ten U.S. travelers plan to take a road trip this year.

That's up 57% from last year.