What’s The Worst Place To Stop On A Road Trip?

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)

Summer is in full swing, which means it’s officially road trip season — time to pack the kids into the Family Truckster and venture across the continent, taking in every sight, sound, and smell between point A and point B.

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The problem is, many of those sights and sounds and smells are pretty terrible. When you’ve got a country as spread out as the United States, you’re going to run into a lot of middle areas with nothing happening — or worse, something going on that you’d really rather not be a part of. So, today, we ask: What’s the worst place to stop by on a road trip?

I’m a longtime lover of highway rest stops, having used them as everything from a quick bite and bathroom to the location of a nice half-hour in-car nap on sleep-deprived college drives. But while many of New York’s gorgeous, scenic rest stops make fantastic places to stretch your legs, the same can’t be said of the stops that dot the Jersey Turnpike.

The Jersey Turnpike may not quite deserve all the hate it receives, but it’s still a loathsome strip of tarmac that’s home to a thousand different weird and bad smells. Its rest stops, tucked right against its oddly-split lanes of travel, cannot hide their location to their occupants — the sights, sounds, and smells are exactly like the rest of the Turnpike. They’re unpleasant.

My vote for the worst place to stop on a road trip is any rest area off the Jersey Turnpike, but what’s yours? Do you hate the world’s largest ball of yarn, or is there a has station right off the highway that tried to charge you $30 per gallon? Let us know down below, and I’ll pick out the best answers later in the week.