Driving across a large portion of the US can be an arduously boring undertaking at times. Fortunately, we live in an age when we can carry a massive library of audiobooks, podcasts, and music in our pockets! Furthermore, most public libraries are well stocked with audiobooks of all kinds and a wide assortment of music on CD. If you have some travel in your future, I have some suggestions to help you while away the long hours of driving past the corn and soybean fields!

Podcasts

I find that history podcasts are great for shortening the long hours on a long road trip if the podcaster can create a compelling narrative to accompany the otherwise-dry names and dates. Your mileage may vary, of course! Rimshot

I will simply refer to my old posts on podcast favorites from last year for this category:
Suggested Listening: A Podcast Recommendation List
Suggested Listening 2: Another Podcast Recommendation List

Audiobooks

The possible selection is almost as varied as the options for traditional books. Whatever your genre of choice, there's probably an audiobook selection too! Most popular authors have audiobook editions available along with the paperbacks and hardbacks in the library where I work. There are also usually audio versions of classic literature, too. You can catch up on Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, or even authors whose names start with one of the other 25 letters of the alphabet!

Librivox and Project Gutenberg often have free audiobook downloads available, too. I wrote about one author whose works are available through these sources some months ago.

On our trip, we listened to The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein and Kerplunk! by Patrick F. McManus. The former is a classic always worth hearing again. The latter is a collection of short humor stories about hunting, fishing, camping, and growing up in the Northwest wilderness. McManus is very much like a modern Mark Twain, so I cannot recommend his works highly enough.

Music

Here your preferences will dictate what you should bring along.

My traveling companion and I both like folk music and bluegrass, so my MP3 library included local bands like Brownsmead Flats, the Celtic Nots, Northern Cross, and the Muskrat Ramblers. We also listened to a lot of John Hartford and other big-name bluegrass bands like The Cherryholmes Family, Ricky Skaggs, and Nickel Creek.

But what road trip is complete without silly songs as well? Not only was 'Weird Al' Yankovic played in the rotation, but Doctor Demento novelty song collections are a gold mine as well. For example:

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