Road trips used to be a hallmark of family summer vacations, but with the price of gas and the state of the economy, that may not be so true any more.

Still, there is something about the lure of the open road that always has appealed to Americans, and a new young adult novel by retired Everett librarian Carole Estby Dagg captures that spirit of adventure in a wonderful summer read titled “The Year We Were Famous.”

This book is based on the true story of Dagg’s great-aunt, who walked 4,000 miles across America in 1896 in an effort to save her family’s farm in tiny Mica Creek, Wash., from foreclosure.

Then a teenager, Clara Estby and her Norwegian immigrant mother Helga set out from their farm south of Spokane once they had secured the promise of a $10,000 reward if they could make the journey to New York City, entirely on foot, in under seven months.

That was before highways were built across the western states, so for the first several hundred miles they picked their way alongside railroad tracks.

On their trek they endured flash floods, blizzards, injuries and heat stroke in the lava beds of Idaho. They met mayors and governors and president-elect William McKinley. They encountered Indians, highwaymen, suffragettes, wild animals and a dashing young newsman in Salt Lake City who taught Clara how to ride a newfangled contraption called a bicycle.

Even more significantly for Clara, who knew she was expected to marry the young farmer next door once she returned home, they met women along the way who were doctors, lawyers or journalists.

The trip forced Clara and Helga to accept one another’s very different approaches to life — it was the only way they could hope to complete the journey. And as the trust between mother and daughter grew, Clara discovered more about herself than she ever could have imagined when they took those first few steps away from the farm back in Mica Creek.

This is a captivating tale. Dagg incorporates charming real-life anecdotes that have been handed down in Estby family lore, such as Helga’s demonstration of a curling iron to an encampment of Ute Indians.

Dagg also includes rich historical detail, from the rejection of old school “cussable corsets” for modish bicycle costumes, to a mention of the cutting-edge technology of the day, which involved posting presidential election results by magic lantern against the side of a New York City building.

I must note one blunder that slipped through the copy editing cracks – at one point, Clara talks about outgoing President Calvin Coolidge, who came a quarter of a century later! The reference should have been to another recession-plagued president, Grover Cleveland.

But no matter which financial crisis it is, the lessons of perseverance and resourcefulness that derive from “The Year We Were Famous” are instructive to those of us who are limited by economic necessity to armchair traveling this summer!