This is what it's like to take a Ford Escape on a road trip to the heart of the US auto industry

Compact SUVs are selling like crazy these days, threatening to displace the beloved sedan as the starter car of choice. Smaller SUVs and crossovers are also being snapped up by families and retirees, setting off much discussion in the auto industry about whether cars are enduring a slow fade to irrelevance in the US as consumers vote for SUV versatility.

Over the past few years, I've sampled numerous compact SUVs, and for the most part, I've found them to be uniformly excellent. This is an area in which most automakers seem to have figured out what they're doing. But my personal favorite vehicle in the segment has long been the Ford Escape. It's sort of intangible, my affection for the Escape: I like its overall sense of scale, that it feels more like a truck than a car (even though the current design hails from Europe, hardly a land where trucks rule the landscape as they do in the US).

However, I've never taken a compact SUV on a long trip, so when the opportunity rolled around earlier this year, I jumped on it. The 2016 Escape Titanium tips the scales at about $33,000 with the options package that I enjoyed.

Come along for the ride!