The urge to discover what lies just beyond the next bend in the road is part of the national psyche. Just how Americans have satisfied that yearning -- frorn horse-drawn camping wagons and and 1920's house cars to 1960 hippie buses and today's mansions on wheels -- is the subjcct of a new book out this month (March, 2000).

Home on the Road: The Motor Home in America by historian Rogcr White of the National Museum of American History, is published by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Like the adventurous 1920's family above (their identity unknown), hundreds of middle- and uppcr-class city dwellcrs of the time turned bus or truck chassis into one of-a-kind house cars. In portable parlors with built-in kitchens and bedrooms, they left the city to explore in relative comfort the American wilderness.

About that time, the Renner family of DeMoines, Iowa, went west in their house car built on a Model T truck chassis. Rccalled Ralph Renner, "In Yellowstone going down from the highest peak, Dad got the gear in neutral and with no brakes ran into the mountain on the right side to stop." The car flipped over. No one was injurcd, but an axle was bent. A blacksmith, working with a road gang, fixed it. Other motorists rolled the car back over, and the family was back on tour. "A trip in a house car was always a mixture of challcnges and pleasures," writes White. Out of a fad an industry grew, he adds, "as each generation discovered the pleasures living on the American roadside.

-=Beth Py-Lieberman=-