Being a public educator, I am fortunate enough to have built-in breaks. So for our spring break back in 2021, my daughter and I went on our first road trip together. I had a little money from my tax return and could feel it begging me to use it for fun. It had been a tough year. Schools all over the country had reopened with new Covid policies in place, leaving many children feeling disconnected even when they were in the same place as their peers. Adults were taking out their frustrations from their keyboards over mask wearing and write-them-as-you-go rules. Covid popping up in a household meant a student would be quarantined for up to two weeks, which also meant constantly keeping up with creating and sending home work for them to do at home. There was no semblance of mental or physical rest for anyone anywhere.
Beyond the classroom, my family suffered a major loss: my grandfather's health went into a sharp decline, and we lost him only two months into the school year. Due to medical facility policies surrounding Covid, he lay sick in a hospital for over a week with no one from our family allowed to be by his side. The only updates we could get on his status were by phone from various doctors and nurses. He finally felt well enough to be sent home, but he would refuse going to a care facility. Our family took turns helping him with his oxygen machine, feeding him, and helping him walk from his bed to his chair by the window. His prognosis would shorten every time we spoke with his doctors, and then, we were left with a world without him.
So with all that had been happening, it made sense for Nerd (that's my kiddo) and me to map out an adventure to find joy in places away from the familiar while learning more about historic landmarks and geological wonders. And for the last three years, each road trip has helped us to explore states we've never been to. I was like so many of the privileged kids from the burbs of metro-Atlanta who had their family vacation to the exact same spot on the Florida panhandle year after year. There is beauty and comfort in that because it created a sense of security in its predictability while my parents were raising my brother and me. And it probably made planning a hell of a lot easier for my parents when the rental company's phone number was kept in the drawer by the phone. Yet there is a small part of me that wishes there had been more variety in traveling with my family, more chances to create an assortment of memories each summer. In being a parent myself now, I get to establish the predictability component (the annual road trip) and the sense of wonder (the places we explore).
It didn't take long for Nerd and me to establish traditions for our road trips. The easiest one was coming home to our giant canvas map of the US and putting pins into the places we visited. She got to choose the color of the pins (purple) that represent where we have been together. Then there's the tradition of checking license plates for their states of origin and seeing how many we can "collect". This teaches her state abbreviations and it gets her off her device for much longer spells while we drive. It turns out she likes to collect things as much as her mother, even if it is just jotting down abbreviations.
But it's the next tradition that evolved so beautifully this year, I had to write about it.
For our first two adventures on the road, Nerd and I collaborated to create a playlist before leaving home so we could carry with us some of our favorite songs. She's being raised by two musical parents (even though we live in separate households now), so she has good taste in tunes. When our '21 trip took us to West Virginia, we added a couple of versions of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" to the list. Our '22 trip started with Nerd's first real concert (Brandi Carlile), so we had every musician from the show on repeat. Hopefully, this shows you how we connect the music to our real lives.
When I started planning the '23 trip through the states of the northeast, I figured we would sit down together to collab on our next playlist. But then I came across a Tiktok video where a grown woman and her mother shared a travel idea that I fell in love with immediately. When they travel as a mom-and-daughter duo, they ask strangers to share a song that means something to them. They choose a theme for each list they make (they were up to their 5th list), and the theme in their video was "Songs that Make you Really Fucking Happy". The video goes on to say that this act of engagement with strangers sometimes led to deeper connections and conversations, which is something I love to do when I travel.
Nerd and I excitedly agreed that we would give this strangers' playlist idea a solid try. We didn't come up with a theme for ours, though. No genre parameters, no hints at what kind of music we typically listen to. All that was required was a short conversation with a stranger whose energy seemed receptive and could offer a song for us to listen to at some point in our travels. We tag-teamed it, usually sharing a silent look of "this person seems cool" before one of us would say to the other, "Would you like to ask this person our question?" And then we would collect a significant piece of that stranger through their musical connections by writing it down in our notebook. It's cute. It has birds on the cover.
We accumulated 20 songs as we journeyed from all along the spectrum of genres. We failed in our first attempt. I had awkwardly stopped a woman walking past us in Philly because she was wearing the shirt from Brandi Carlile's tour from the previous year. I didn't say anything about our list or how we were on a road trip. I basically went dumbass fangirl and said, "Oh my god, I have that shirt because we went to her concert in Nashville last year and now tell me your favorite Carlile song."
I think I scared her a little.
Don't worry. Our methods were effective for the rest of the trip.
In asking a National Parks ranger for his song while he was working in the country's first Supreme Court chamber in Independence Hall, he said, "I get asked so many questions every day, and rarely do I feel stumped. So let me think on this first." Hand to his chin, he recounted a recent evening sitting by the fire pit with his wife. He said they had been listening to the blues, specifically the songs of Wynonie Harris. The ranger offered up two songs for our list from this artist of the 1940s. Even better? He connected both songs to the court chambers. "Good Morning Judge" is more obvious. But "Grandma Plays the Numbers" is more of a stretch. If you listen, though, you can probably figure it out.
Then there were the four nurses from California at the table next to us at dinner one night. They were loud before their drinks arrived, their energy filling their corner of the bar. Nerd and I knew we had to ask them. So after giving her a little hype talk, Nerd strolled over to their table, pen and bird notebook in hand, and asked the question with such poise that the nurses turned in search of the adult attached to her. Once they understood the assignment, they fought for turns in giving their entries. They even wrote their songs in the notebook themselves.
Our favorite song addition came from our server at breakfast in our hotel in Philly. His name was Khalif, and I guessed he must have been in his early- to mid-twenties. You could see the beauty of his soul in how he smiled, so it felt natural to ask him to be our next contributor. His eyes misted over. There was no sitting in contemplation on this one for Khalif. He vulnerably offered a brief story about how his mother had passed away two years prior, and the song they listened to together was "I'll Be Missing You" by Diddy and Faith Evans. Now whenever he hears that song, he thinks of his momma. A part of me felt that I had somehow overstepped, and I was embarrassed that I didn't even ask him to tell me more about his mom. But another part of me realized what a tender moment that was to share with a total stranger. Next to his tip on the receipt, I wrote him a note thanking him for what he had shared with us. I just wish I had hugged him before we departed.
By the end of our week-long journey, our strangers' playlist was the exact length of our drive home from the Atlanta airport, which was also the first time we listened to it from start to finish. The challenge in asking each other, "Now who shared this song with us?" shaped our conversation as we cruised down the interstate, pretending to be Pop Tarts toasting in the dark orange glow of the tunnels. Nerd's memory of each experience astounded me. She could recall the person or the location or the situation in listening to most of the songs. She shared how she felt about each piece as we listened. It was obvious that she had created space for each stranger as we journeyed through the list. This was what I had hoped for.
And then she held my hand while I cried listening to "I'll Be Missing You", thinking about Khalif and his momma.
The memories played through my mind like a montage at the end of a movie you don't want to end, but you're grateful that you invested the time in watching it. The waitress in Maryland driving home after a long shift singing along to "Drops of Jupiter". The resistant ice cream shop proprietor in Gettysburg making a cup of coffee for his wife as Jim Croce is piped into the parlor for the tourists. The two young women rage-screaming the lyrics of "Darkness Before the Dawn" as they close up the tea shop on the seaside boardwalk in Delaware.
So this is me telling you to make a strangers' playlist the next time you travel. Even if you only talk to a total of three strangers, and they all happen to be your Uber drivers taking you to dinner downtown, just do it. We have convinced ourselves that the world is full of assholes who would sooner spit on your new shoes than break bread with you. And, to an extent, you'd be right. But so much of that is what we perceive, and it's done in a brief and passing encounter with a stranger. Give a stranger the chance to open up about something personal to them, and you might experience a moment of magic.
Our list is linked below!
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