Last week Megan and I made the long drive from St. Louis to Virginia for Thanksgiving, then back the other way a few days later. We stocked up on podcasts, audio books, and comedy specials to keep us occupied during the drive.
I highly recommend two of the specials we listened to; both are new on Netflix:
- Mike Birbiglia’s “The Old Man and the Pool”: This is the one that will stick with me the longest, as it tells a cohesive story from start to finish, largely about mortality…yet it’s consistently laugh-out-loud funny.
- Pete Holmes’ “I Am Not for Everyone”: Holmes has a similar regular-guy vibe to Birbiglia, and we laughed quite a bit at his special. His stories are more disconnected, but they’re still quite funny.
Two other notes from the road trip:
- We take interstate 64 the entire way to Virginia and back, which covers long stretches of deer country. Sadly, this meant that there were dozens upon dozens of dead deer on the side of the road (all presumably hit by cars). While there are signs warning drivers of deer, I wish there was a better way to protect them from this sad fate. We actually came to a complete stop at one point because a fawn was slowly crossing the road–fortunately it was during the day and we could see it from a distance.
- I drive an electric car, and it tells us where to stop along the way to charge the car, leaving a safe buffer in case we run into unforeseen circumstances. However, it didn’t seem to take into account the cold temperatures, and we came incredibly close to running out of electricity. The car said we had 6 miles left, but I couldn’t get it to go above 55 mph on the highway at that point, and fortunately we made it up a hill and used minimal energy to coast down the exit and over to the charger. We added a bigger buffer from then on.
I hope your holiday travels went well! Do you have a favorite comedy special from the last few months?
That is an epic drive!.
Good idea about the podcasts, I need to adopt that on our long drives . I have heard that cold weather dramatically reduces battery cars performance/range.
Hopefully this is something that is ironed out by technology going forward 🙂
I hope so too! Or at least that the cars will take the cold weather into account for these calculations. 🙂
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about the deer problem. Of course, the fact that we build roads through their habitat is the main issue with car-deer collisions, and sadly, there aren’t a lot of great solutions to give the deer a better way to cross the roads. But aside from that, management of deer populations is generally really bad right now. I’m speaking mostly from the perspective of someone in Wisconsin, so other states may vary. Between a highly supressed wolf population, overly-restrictive hunting regulations, and a general decline in the number of hunters out there, the deer population has begun to get out of control. The deer population in Wisconsin is 70% higher today than it was in 2008. Add the destruction of their habitat, and the growing deer population is forced into smaller and smaller areas, and those areas are criscrossed by lots of roads and highways.
That’s interesting; I hadn’t thought about too many deer being a bad thing, but balance is important.