Coveting in Nashville
True Road Trip Tales
A quest for a Gibson Super 400 leads three friends to Nashville
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Route 66 and the Checker
True Road Trip Tales
Ernie takes his Checker Marathon through the heart of America to the promised land.
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Big Blue and Mardi Gras
True Road Trip Tales
Three college women drive from Kansas to New Orleans in a '79 Cadillac Seville
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Two for the road
True Road Trip Tales
Brad and George go big to rediscover the soul of America
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Road Trip Reawakening
True Road Trip Tales
The story of Rob and Toodles, the ocean and oranges, Widespread and underwear, and plugging back into life.
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Burning Man to Vegas
True Road Trip Tales
Burning Man to Vegas You have to hand it to Las Vegas: over decades, it has established itself as an adult playground where virtually anything goes. If you want the chance to revel in excess and not feel like you have to make any excuses for your choices or behavior, Vegas is the place. Sure, the shops and shows and spectacle and helicopter rides and Hoover Dam lend the city a patina of respectability, but everyone knows its pure decadence is really the draw. For people who think Las Vegas has too many rules that get in the way of the good time they really want to have, Burning Man is a...
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Cousin Eddie goes to Clemson
True Road Trip Tales
This story encompasses some elements that couldn’t be more American: an annual guy’s trip, college football, a carefully constructed song list, and an RV. Enjoy.
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Highway 61 and the crossroads
True Road Trip Tales
This episode is about chasing ghosts and legends—always a tricky proposition. The legend in question: the crossroads (purportedly at the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi), where a young Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for prowess on the guitar.
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Love, Daytona Beach, and Pop-Tarts
True Road Trip Tales
This story has so much we can all relate to—high school friendships, first love, spring break, a wildly ambitious plan, and some indelible life lessons. We said in the first episode that the road reveals. This tale is exhibit A.
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Gemini Gypsy
True Road Trip Tales
Ep 3:
info_outlineRoad trip reawakening
I’m a firm believer in low expectations as a key element of a happy life. When you go into anything fully expecting to have the best time of your life, you’re inevitably disappointed. How often can the stars really align? Examples abound in all parts of life. All the best concerts I’ve seen were in part a product of not expecting much going in. And no victory is sweeter than the upset.
One of the best parts of a road is that the unknown makes it impossible to have well-defined, high expectations. There’s such a huge variance for what could happen that as long as your car doesn’t break down and you have something to report back, you’re ahead of the game.
Partly for this reason, I’ve never taken a road trip where I did start with a fair bit of excitement and anticipation. Even when you know your traveling company well and the route is set, you never know what conversations and experiences are waiting. “Who knows what could happen?” is a big part of it.
But what if the prevailing attitude is “Who gives a shit?” There are low expectations, and then there’s the total absence of expectations.
In this episode, the total lack of expectations was so completely liberating that the result was a life-altering experience. It also features one of the best articulations of why the road trip is so alluring:
“Once you give into the notion of a road trip, you're suspending time that you knew in the conventional sense. You're suspending deadlines. You're suspending paying bills. All the other shit that makes life a drag is in suspension because you have a new relationship with time. And that relationship is, ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Not, ‘What do I have to do?’ That choice, being able to explore those options and that new sense of time, is extremely liberating.”
This is the story of Rob and Toodles, the ocean and oranges, Widespread and underwear, and plugging back into this whole surreal journey called life.