Roadmap? Check. Kool Mints? Check. On-road eye-spys? Check? Selection of horrifically inappropriate songs? Better add another Celine track.

The road-trip mixtape: a most beloved travel accessory/necessity/cruciality of mine, the mixtape (keyword: TAPE) which is slowly but surely finding its way to the outer realm of ‘things to pack’. What has happened to our dear friend? Has this cherished and thoughtful magnetic strip of musical accompaniment?

In times of travel this ancient device has been essentially overruled by the more anti-social and individual experience of the holier-than-thou-tapedeck iPod. Whatever happened to singalongs to metres of magnetic tape holding musical masterpieces that only ever surface in times of travel, where each passenger realises no-one in the magical world outside the car can judge them for belting out the bridge to One Sweet Day? People in the front: Mariah. Backseat lovers: the Boyz… or have they progressed to Men yet?

Unless Mr Check-out-how-faithful-I-am-to-Apple in the passenger seat has brought his iPod adapter to share his love of ‘The Whistle Song’ with the townspeople, we may be doomed to a bleak future in which ye olde jolly road trip becomes an experience of silentia. On journeys of Long and Winding Roads, the rewards of a manually laboured mixtape have been shunted to the right-click-Add-to-Playlist world of mp3: ‘Mix #8798780946234782327’ of your iTunes extravaganza.

Essentially, it seems what made this seemingly innocent piece of plastic and cogs so worthwhile, was the painstaking labour process upon which its survival depended. You burn a CD. You craft a mixtape. Painstakingly selecting which songs will generate the most enthusiastic assault on the volume dial, you sift for that musical Easter Egg from piles of shiny discs of glory or tapes from yesteryear, sitting patiently through each potential trip-maker, your patient finger poised on the pause button. A regular travel DJ.

But alas. Our plastic friend has used his frequent flyer points. There’s a new traveller in town. iTastic. You kids and your audio quality. Where’s the strange little blip between songs on a much-loved cassette which the creator tried so hard to eliminate? In our techno-savvy travel days, the mixtapes which dominated the 1980s have become a relic of the past. Compilations of delicious musical confectionary burnt to CD or mp3 now take minutes, rather than painstaking hours to create. Happily admitted, the advent of the ‘Pod has certainly improved the sound and variety of our vacation soundtracks, with a mere 80 minute collection of highway favourites becoming an 80 gig musical biblioteque on wheels. But where is the love? Put some elbow grease in, the authenticity will thank you.

Nanna-musings aside, whatever musical suitcase you choose, a mix of favourites and foes of melodic bliss are essential to providing a soundtrack to your expedition. After all, what is a five-hour trek up the coast without surround-sound xylophone, a deliciously mum-esque Motown beat and a collective ‘na-na-na-na hey hey hey…goodbye’.

The mixtape is essentially a statement of your trip and its expected outcomes. Whether you wish to arrive thematically at your beachside destination to the serene reggae sounds of ‘A-la-la-la-la-long-long-le-long-long-long’ or make a serious youth-hits-road-to-have-an-effing-rebellious-adventure impression on the elderly couple in cabin nine with The Roof Is On Fire, your choice of songs become the musical metaphor for your trip. A cocktail of Sigur Rós and mountainscapes anyone? Or how about a mélange of Van Morrison, an automobile full of family dramas, and a carsick ferret. Happy faces everyone!

According to our good friends at Wikipedia who also share my love of this lost icon of travel necessity, from an aesthetic point of view, many enthusiasts believe that because a tape player, unlike a CD player, lacks the ability to skip from song to song, the mixtape needs to be considered in its entirety. So perhaps you should reconsider that Kenny G track you find rather fetching. Or the fact that you may just be the only enthusiast in the vehicle for Rick Astley’s auburn-haired crooning. As you whisk merrily past fields of sheep, ramshackle farmhouses, and roadstops which seem to scream ‘Wolf Creek! Wolf Creek!’, you can’t escape the programmed progression of pre-planned pieces on your mixtape which, unlike the more sympathetic CD, does not allow you to skip Dexy’s Midnight Runners unless you are a fast-forwarding flippin’ genius. Suffer in your little car-bound booties. There’s no ‘Shuffle Songs’ here kids. Too-ra-loo-rai-effing-ay.

Mixtapes successfully soothe any family bickering, as the tapedeck becomes a metaphorical piano, around which ye olden days of singalongs can bring a smile to even the most pouty backseat teen. As an added bonus the songs serve an additional handy dandy purpose: they drown out dad jokes.

The creation of travel mixtapes is always a thorny process as several factors need to be weighed up before that precious record button is attacked.

a) whether your audience comprises mates with a penchant for ridiculing your ‘Summer of ‘69’ obsession, or your parents who probably know more words than your feeble efforts of knowing where he ‘bought his first real six-string’

b) whether your destination is one which allows enough highway time away from civilisation for you to get away with cranking ‘Whoop There It Is’ out your car windows without sidewalk judgement

c) how many mixtapes will span the length of your journey- a short collection of singalong stingers, or an epic compilation of more pensive moments of musical window staring and thoughtful co-passenger glances.

And then there’s the rules. There’s nothing like putting two songs of the same artist to ruin your narrative arc. As Rob Fleming of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity tell us budding compilers:

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do.”

For the love of the mixtape god, consider your transitions! Never under any circumstances follow Cat Stevens' Peace Train with a zinger from Rihanna’s repertoire. At least give it a song. Or death by slap. And start with an ear-catcher. No-one wants to embark on a voyage which exceeds the two-hour joy period of driving with a heart-wrenching Jeff Buckley Hallelujah. Chins up kiddies!

And so with all my plastic and tape filled heart, I propose a re-exploration of this lost realm of travelling musical accompaniment, and a re-hash of this treasured travel necessity. Put in the hours of studied song selection for a relic of your trip which will serve as a postcard to your future self of a vacation worth soundtracking. If all else fails in this iWorld of gadgets galore… at least you look cool.