One of the reasons I love the Bad Dates podcast is that it provides a nearly universal conversation topic. Most people have probably gone on a bad date at some point (either due to you, them, or both), and if you’re a decent storyteller, it makes for good entertainment. In the same vein is the Born to Love podcast (the guest picks something they love and talks about it for 30 minutes).
It’s for this same reason that I got excited when I learned that Seth and Josh Meyers have a podcast called Family Trips that’s all about…you guessed it, family trips! They host celebrities who chat for around an hour about memorable family vacations from their childhood and what their family trips look like now (if they’re parents).
Seeing the country on a budget was important to my parents, so we took quite a few trips when I was younger. My sister, brother, and I would pile into the minivan with my parents, and most often we would end up at a family reunion or a campground.
Probably the most memorable family trip from my youth was a 3-week cross-country Amtrak trip we took. We went from Richmond to Chicago (where I was really excited to see a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park) to Bryce Canyon (still probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in person), up to the Pacific Northwest, over to Montana (where I spent nearly 10 hours of a hike making random loud sounds so grizzly bears wouldn’t bother me), then back home. I may be combining multiple trips and there are certainly gaps in my memory, but those are the parts that stand out.
As a young adult, my family came to visit me in Japan, where my mom biked around on a flat tire for 2 days before I realized why she was going so slow. The next year we visited my sister in France, which was both lovely and a comedy of errors of bad timing (I had strep for the first few days and was snoring so badly that my sister made me sleep in the bathroom; we traveled to Versailles on the one day of the week it was closed; my mom ordered a cold kosher fish for me to eat on the plane home while everyone else got delicious French food, and so on).
I’m starting to realize that some of the best memories of these trips are what feel like the worst parts at the time. Everything else kind of blurs together.
Thinking about this makes me want to find podcasts all about the following:
- A podcast where the guest tells stories about their pets. I love hearing people talk about their pets (past or present).
- A podcast where the guest talks about their worst (or most comical) injury. While I don’t like people to get hurt, nor do I like to watch people get hurt, I have found that people love to talk about past injuries. In a way, I think this helps us process those painful memories.
Do you have any recent podcast recommendations? Are there any great conversation topics that you think would make for a great podcast?