I grew up poor. For much of my childhood—indeed, for much of my life—we just didn’t take vacations at all. When I was in high school, though, my older sister went away to college, and every summer until I went away myself, “vacation” meant a one-week driving trip from LA County to Washington State to visit Elaine. I am not alone in this; many Americans have basically their only real memories of vacation be memories of seeing the country from a car window. Even today, when I talk about going on trips, it’s road trips.

All this came to mind last week when I saw a documentary on the history of American road trip movies called Wanderlust. It’s pretty good and worth checking out if you’ve got the opportunity. However, what struck me as something worth writing about even though I wasn’t sure I could get a full review out of it was an observation that the road trip movie is just an extension of that other uniquely American genre, the Western. I could be wrong, and I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I’m not sure the cinema of other countries produces much in the way of either.

Obviously, the Western is a celebration of American heritage. If it isn’t set in the US—or, I suppose, Canada or arguably northern Mexico—it isn’t a Western. Sometimes, they are US history, whether real or mutated, as with all those versions of the gunfight at the OK Corral. We replay our history on the screen over and over again, dime novel heroes now on the silver screen. Conversely, though, we have also fictionalized our history and populated it with the Ringo Kid, Will Kane, and Bill Munny. We have archetypes who are to us the same as folk heroes of other nations, and that is what the Western has created.

But with very few exceptions, characters in Westerns are travelers or have traveled. The Old West is a story of transition. Migration. It is a time of immigration. While not all Westerns are the story of getting from point A to point B, any number of them are, including some of the greats. Stagecoach, of course. Most of How the West Was Won involves people going one place or another. True Grit is about following someone. And so forth. And of movies set in one location, there is still movement. Shane is about a drifter. High Noon involves people coming and going from the town. All those OK Corral stories are set in Arizona and are about men born in Illinois and Georgia and New York.

Perhaps it’s our origin as a nation of immigrants. Even when we ourselves are no longer migratory—I hate moving with a passion that’s welling even as I know we need a new home—we still look at travel as enjoyable, most of us. Who among us would really prefer to explore our own homes instead of going somewhere and seeing new things?

And, yes, the Old West is no more. Has not existed for more than a century. There are still people doing many of the necessary jobs of those days—even herding cattle is a thing that still gets done, albeit not in the same way as it once was—but there’s no sense of glamour to it anymore.

What do we have instead? The allure of the open road. I don’t think the road trip movie has produced the same quantity of classics, maybe not even the same quality, but still; there are any number of movies where the protagonists spend time traveling even if that isn’t the whole story. There are even movies set almost completely in one place where the appeal of travel is spelled out for us. Say Anything . . . is mostly set in and around Seattle, but the moment of release is on an airplane, and many other details are automotive.

Where I live, we measure distance in time. It doesn’t matter if you use miles or kilometers, because the place you’re going is an hour away. It’s not quite two hours to Portland from here. Not quite an hour to the beach. Everything in Olympia is fifteen minutes away. (True and very weird.) Because the point is not the distance but the journey. Stagecoach or train or station wagon, we talk most about the trip.