A Family Road Trip to Florida in 1973 — From the Gas Lines to the Mermaids

It's December 1973. You pull out of Dayton, Ohio, before dawn with the presents in the trunk, headed for Grandma and Grandpa in Florida, about 1,100 miles south. A month ago the President told the country to make do with less: refiners would send 15 percent less gasoline to the stations, and he asked every gas station to shut its pumps from 9 pm Saturday to midnight Sunday. Regular costs about 44 cents a gallon, up from about 38 in May, and by January crude will cost $11.65 a barrel, up from $2.90 before the embargo. So on this trip, you think about Sundays and about every tank. How a family drive south for the winter looked in 1973, and why so many of the places on it did not last: Interstate 75 out of Dayton, Harland Sanders' old café in Corbin, the painted Rock City barns, Ruby Falls and the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, the Big Chicken in Marietta, Stuckey's, the glass-bottom boats of Silver Springs, the mermaids of Weeki Wachee, Cypress Gardens, Christmas at Century Village, the Fontainebleau and South Beach, airboats on the Tamiami Trail, the Overseas Highway and the Seven Mile Bridge, and the sunset at Mallory Square in Key West. Then what happened next: the worst of the gas shortage came in February 1974, after you were home, the last gap in I-75 closed in December 1977, and ABC sold Silver Springs and Weeki Wachee in 1984. Chapters 00:00 December 1973: pulling out of Dayton 01:15 The embargo and the Sunday plan 03:08 Ohio and Kentucky 04:50 Tennessee: Rock City and Chattanooga 08:18 Georgia 11:23 Florida: the springs 14:32 The Turnpike 16:58 Christmas at Century Village 20:31 Miami Beach 22:04 The Tamiami Trail 24:10 The Overseas Highway 27:16 Key West 29:00 The drive home 30:22 What happened next Roadside Slides: America from the road, 1970s, one stop at a time. Real photographs from public archives. New road trip every week. Images: real photographs and postcards from public archives (credits below) and Pexels footage; where no photo exists, illustrated reconstructions. Not every photo is from 1973: some of the Key West and Everglades pictures were taken in 1972, the Rock City and Georgia slides in 1979-80, and the postcards in the 1930s-60s; they show the place, not the date. The gas-line and closed-station pictures are from Portland, Oregon, shown as "that winter", not as a place on the route. Every script is researched and fact-checked. Sources: National Archives (DOCUMERICA), Library of Congress, Boston Public Library (Tichnor Brothers), State Archives of Florida, Federal Reserve History, Miller Center, American Presidency Project, Roadside America, Florida Memory, Silver Springs and Weeki Wachee park histories, Rock City and Ruby Falls, Everglades National Park, Overseas Highway histories, Florida Keys history sites. Photo credits Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Bubba73 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ɱ (CC BY-SA 4.0); Xnatedawgx (CC BY-SA 3.0); Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0); Mike McBey (CC BY 2.0); Christina Rutz (CC BY 2.0); Jackdude101 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ebyabe (CC BY 2.5, CC BY-SA 3.0); Jared from Clermont (CC BY 2.0); Robbschultz69 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0); John Goetzinger (CC BY-SA 2.0); Ka!zen (CC BY-SA 2.0). Public domain / archives: DOCUMERICA, U.S. National Archives (Flip Schulke, Fred Ward and others); John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library; Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress; Curt Teich & Co.; State Library and Archives of Florida / Florida Memory; NASA; Oliver F. Atkins; Walter Smalling Jr. and Kate Kasparek (HABS, Library of Congress); official White House photographs; vintage postcards and photos with no known author (Silver Springs, Weeki Wachee, Cypress Gardens). Footage and photos from Pexels: Robert Karyś, kris, princess, Alice AliNari, Brixiv. #florida #roadtrip #1970s #vintageamerica #nostalgia #americana