Early in the ep, Lucy is plotting their trip to include the sites everyone wants to see. The ones named are Niagara Falls, Cincinnati, New Orleans, the Rockies, the Ozarks Mountains, Carlsbad Cavern, the Grand Canyon and Salt Lake City. Lucy makes like it's tough to plan a trip that would include all those spots, but really, it wouldn't be all that difficult. I mean, from New York City you go to Niagara Falls then to Cincinnati, Ohio. From there you travel through Missouri and Arkansas to get through the Ozarks, then through Texas to New Mexico to hit Carlsbad. From New Mexico it's north to Colorado to get to the Rocky Mountains. From Colorado, you go to Utah to get to Salt Lake City, then south to Arizona for the Grand Canyon then drive on to Hollywood. It's the long way to Hollywood, admittedly, but it's not as hard as Lucy tries to pretend it is. Incidentally, if you look closely at the lines on the map Lucy has drawn, her chosen route does not take them to either the Ozarks or New Orleans. Actually, the lines completely circumvent Louisiana and the Ozarks.

Just a guess, but it might have had something to do with the fact that the US did not yet have an Interstate Highway System, which Ike signed into law a couple years later. Planning a trip with that many stops would add a lot more time, expense and question marks on the more primitive highway system of the time.

-JD

Yeah, you're the Interstate Highway system we now have was not initiated until the year after this ep was made. I should point out that the map Lucy was using was not a fold-out service station map. It was a flat cardboard sheet. Which would have been useless, I would think, for mapping out a trip as Lucy was trying to.