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While my husband drives, I use Google to look up the histories of and stories related to the towns/cities we're passing through and read them out loud to him.
It's amazing how much fascinating American history we've learned this way!
And, we've often decided to take detours to see stuff we would've never known existed otherwise. Those detours are usually the highlight of our long road trips.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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I have always enjoyed driving, so 8 hours on the road is fine with me, as long as I have music to listen to. We have Sirius so I can listen to "70s on 7" (classic rock) the whole way, without having to keep searching and changing FM stations as we lose the signals. My wife will bring along her iPad and sometimes read an E-book or look up some places to stop along the way.
We use to drive 13 hours from NY to IN every year to see our parents. One Thanksgiving trip we happed upon a Sirius channel that was playing old radio programs with Thanksgiving themes. They were all comedies and made that trip enjoyable and memorable. We were in a holiday mood when we arrived.
We kept our Sirius introductory subscription for the car when we found we could play it through Alexa in the house too. The Beatles channel snd Classic Vinyl are favorites when sewing or restoring antique sewing machines.
I have an online card game that I play on my phone if I'm not driving. It involves eight players to eliminate until there is a last man standing. Games take between 30-40 minutes.
It just dawned on me that those of us claiming we are just able to enjoy the scenery are no doubt talking about Daylight driving.
When I was younger there were plenty of drives that included nighttime highway drives. So hmmm yeah those trips added Howard Cosell. We needed to remain attentive.
While my husband drives, I use Google to look up the histories of and stories related to the towns/cities we're passing through and read them out loud to him.
It's amazing how much fascinating American history we've learned this way!
And, we've often decided to take detours to see stuff we would've never known existed otherwise. Those detours are usually the highlight of our long road trips.
For any trip about 8 hours or less, we prefer to just drive, rather than deal with possible flight delays, lost luggage, needing a rental car etc.
We do the obvious things like audiobooks, listen to music, use books of conversation starter questions, even read interesting articles or jokes to each other. Are there other pleasant ways you pass the time on road trips?
Wife and I travel really well together. Sometimes we end up just talking and realized that hours have passed. For other times:
Our best thing is to pick a few podcasts to listen to. True Crime are fun, as is Stuff You should Know and other podcasts
Music, but we don't always like the same music, so the passenger might use heaphpones
Blanket and a pillow. One snoozes while the other drives
Interesting stops along the way. Go a bit out of your way to find a cool place to stop and check out.
Dine in a LOCAL restaurant instead of just getting drive-through and motoring. Lot of good experiences that way.
Those are a few that come to mind. The podcast thing has really been great. We listen for a while, and then have something to talk about. We did a 3-part series on Jeffrey Dahlmer once. As awful as it was, we were both compelled to keep listening.
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