Podcasts make the drive quicker
How to make a 12 hour drive go by faster
12 hours is a long time.
Think about it. That’s half a day. It’s four hours longer than most people work every day. It’s at least 12 episodes of Westworld or any other hour long show. The original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, Revenge of the Sith, and Return of the Jedi) is only six hours long.
But to me 12 hours didn’t seem like a long time. Not yesterday, anyway. Not on my first day of travel, going from Cleveland, Ohio to Portland, Maine in one day. What was my secret?
Okay, so that’s not my secret. If you read the title of the piece you would know that it’s podcasts.
I subscribe to three podcasts and had been not playing them for the last two weeks in order to save up for the trip. They are Effectively Wild: A Fangraphs Baseball Podcast, FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, and Anthropocene Reviewed. Effectively Wild comes out three times per week and is usually between an hour and 90 minutes long. The politics podcast is supposed to be weekly and around 40 minutes long, but there were two emergency podcasts due to breaking political news and a special podcast based on a project. Anthropocene is monthly and clocks in at 20 minutes.
With all of the podcasts downloaded to my phone and my queue set up, driving such a long distance felt much easier. I would hear banter about baseball. And discussions of last week’s political news. The solo trip almost became a multi-person party.
I don’t think I can explain why the trip felt much shorter than it did. Perhaps it’s because I left much earlier than I planned and arrived just before 7 p.m. with the sun still shining. Maybe it was the fact I was so focused on getting to my destination that I couldn’t think about how much time was left to go. Or perhaps, it was my podcasts, keeping me company throughout the day.
Below are some running features of my travel blog.
First up, recapping the drive from Cleveland, Ohio to Portland, Maine
Distance: 731 miles
Time: 12 hours
Stops: 2, in upstate New York and Massachusetts
Hat of the day: I collect baseball caps. Whenever I go to a new stadium, I buy a hat of the local team. During my trip, I will try to wear a different hat every day and report on all of the ones I bought.
Cleveland Indians 2018 batting practice hat
What I listened to: As mentioned earlier, it was all podcasts. Effectively Wild episodes 1232 to 1237. Binge Mode, Infinity War episode. FiveThirtyEight politics, four episodes since June 21.
Where to next: Here in Portland until Friday. My next post will be about the Portland SeaDogs and fireworks.
