Last week I, along with my husband and two kids, took a road trip to Utah. Starting in Minnesota, we drove through Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado to get there. It was a lot of driving. To endure it, especially Nebraska and eastern Colorado, we loaded up an iPod with a lot of Radiolab podcasts. We included a few This American Life’s too.
I’m so glad that we listened to the podcasts. Not only did they make the drives go by faster, but they got me thinking about memory, longing, nostalgia and the tensions between when we need to remember and when we should really forget. I’m hoping to write a much longer essay about these podcasts and how they connected to and enhanced various experiences on the trip, but for now, I just wanted to make sure that I archive the ideas/sources.
- This American Life’s The House on Loon Lake
- Radiolab’s When Am I Dead?, especially Metamorphisis from David Eagleman’s Sum
- Radiolab’s On Repeat from Season 10, Episode 3: Loops
- The Creepy (and haunting) Nostalgia at the Hotel Colorado (where we stayed at the end of our trip)
- Commercial viewed one night in hotel room: Nostalgia is Dumb
In addition to putting these sources beside each other, I also want to put them next to my reflections on and practices of visiting Utah to relive and recreate past vacation experiences. Last year, I attempted to express this through my video, Double Vision: