Ancient Web: Packrat Productions Kept Road-Trip Ratings in HTML

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Packrat Productions treats a road trip as an excuse to collect restaurants, hotel rooms, photographs, strange roadside signs, and stories that probably would not survive an ordinary travel guide.

Visit Packrat Productions.

The homepage's graphical menu divides a remarkably varied personal collection into gardening, genealogy, Celtic history, pilgrim ships, cookbooks, stained glass, ghost stories, and the travels of O'Anne and O'Dave. A link to an old CafePress shop sits beside a guestbook invitation and a family genealogical tree. This is a website built to hold several enthusiasms, not a narrowly defined product.

The most clearly dated evidence is in The Travels of O'Anne and O'Dave. The index reaches back to February 1999 at Moaning Caverns, an April 1999 San Francisco kite trip, a stock drive at Leavitt Meadows, and a visit to the Queen Anne Hotel that December. It continues through trips to Scotland, Gettysburg, and Oregon in 2019.

A rating system with absolutely no algorithm

The travelers devised a zero-based scoring system for hotels and restaurants. Arrive with an open mind, add one point for something unusually good, subtract one for something unusually bad. A score of three means planning a whole trip to return; a negative score may mean never returning at all.

The lists record scores for diners, motels, and establishments scattered across California and beyond, including places marked CLOSED. The historical value is that these are dated personal impressions, not accurate present-day recommendations. Prices, owners, and operating hours are no longer reliable.

The travel index also collects embarrassing signs and surprises encountered en route. Its authors explain that the best moments are often unplanned stops, coincidences, and people met along the way. Hotel rooms, food, and local detours are treated as parts of the experience rather than distractions from a famous monument.

Packrat's founding date is not established by its homepage, and it would be misleading to say every section existed in 1999. The dated travel entries do show a collection rooted in an earlier personal-web habit: somebody makes a long index and steadily keeps adding memories to it.

A conventional travel platform sells the next booking. Packrat Productions documents what two people actually thought of the last one.

Browse the travel journals and the original rating lists.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.