[sixstringtheory]

My wife and I have driven all over the eastern seaboard, to the west coast, the southern tip of Texas, and to Alaska. Would love to retrace some of these routes on a bicycle one day.

We’ve traveled to many places in the world, and there are of course countless great people and sights, but all that really helped provide perspective on just how much we have available to us just in North America: Canada, the US and Mexico contain an incredibly diverse set of landscapes and cultures.

Whenever we go on trips, we will pick a song and listen to it over and over, and then when we hear it later, it helps the memories come back. One of the songs we’ve used is, aptly, America by Simon and Garfunkel.

There are a bunch of books about hitchhiking across America. We have hitched a few rides ourselves. We picked up one called The Last American Hitchhiker by Mark Kneeskern, that we read aloud to each other during journeys. Fascinating vignettes of the culture across the continent.

Thanks for the fun game and for bringing back some memories.

[karmelapple]

Fantastic point about listening to one song over and over again. I have typically purchased an album before a trip, and then listened to that throughout the trip, so any song on that album can hopefully bring me back to that trip mentally.

I unintentionally tried your approach on a recent trip to Iceland, and the same song kept coming on. Over a year later, that one song reminds me of so many parts of the entire trip. I'm going to pick just one song per trip from now on - thanks for pointing out that this approach works!

[unsafecast]

Your point about music is spot-on. Most of the music in my library has a memory associated with it, and I found that it's usually the moment I listened to it the first time.

So whenever one of my favourite artists puts out an album, or I find one that I might like, I save it and listen to it when I know I can do the whole thing, no peeking. I absolutely love how every album brings back a memory.