bruce springsteen | And Then We Laughed

We’re home! We opened our front door at 6:00pm with 2,250 more miles on the truck. Between this trip and the 2245 miles my car earned on our Washington DC trip in June, I think our vehicles need a well-deserved rest. While I am not sure I’d classify us as road trip experts, we’ve both been making multi-day road trips since the age of 18 and haven’t let a couple thousand of miles between us and our destination scare us from traveling and seeing our country. We’re no strangers to flying as a family but not every trip is best suited for such travel. So over the next couple of days, I am going to do my best to organize some thoughts on how to best travel in the car with a toddler and a dog. First up – the music!

Before I get into some specific song choices, I’d like to share the one rule regarding music on road trips to which we adhere:

Driver veto. Whoever is driving on the road trip (which 75% of the time is Clay), get’s the right to veto any song he or she wishes. It is just one of the many privileges that accompanies driving.

Other than that, everything is fair game. We both have iPhones that currently hold our music collection but we have been together long enough that our road trips in college involved the huge 200+ CD cases we both owned. By the time we were married we graduated to the iPod and now the said iPhones. We only utilize the radio about 10% of the time but sometimes we will hit gold and find a local station that churns out amazing songs one after the other. I find this occurrence to be on par with winning $100 at a casino.

So how do you make a spectacular road trip playlist that transcends the bland landscape of our heartland? Easy – choose music you like, that won’t make you fall asleep (e.g. we rarely listen to Bon Iver in the car), and that is easy to sing along too. If you’re like us and have a little one in the car, then you probably try to limit the explicit lyrics. But we certainly do not send ourselves to a Raffi and Laurie Berkner purgatory. Quite the opposite – we have no problem exposing our little guy to great music.

So without further ado, here is just a small sampling of songs that we listen to over the course of 4,800 miles that I compiled into a short playlist (see videos below).