On the Road with Adie

Has there ever been a song that captures the spirit of travel more than Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again? For Miracle, Jolene, and I it has become a refrain to our travels—the song we played when we first went on a weekend together, a song that topped our wedding playlist, the song we played when we left home in August of last year. It was the first song I put on the ever-growing playlist I’ve blogged about in each state (and one of three songs that don’t mention a locale on my playlist). After each breakdown, after each extended stay, whenever we feel like we’re too weary, we put on this song.

Playlist: Arkansas

Three fresh tunes from the Natural State. While we cruise through the eastern edge of the state, we have these three tunes to crank on the old radiobox.

Playlist: Oklahoma

Hello from the northeast corner of the Sooner State, where we will see a Frank Lloyd Wright tower, visit the Bob Dylan archives and manage to squeeze in an interview. Here’s a few tunes to keep us company until we hit the state line.

Arkansas

Home stretch.

The last leg

We left our friends in Minnesota and the realization that the journey of a lifetime is coming to an end. We were charting a course straight south through the Great Plains, hoping to hit the remaining four states of our goal to stay in 49 states. Although we stayed in Iowa once before, we had business to conduct in Clear Lake.

Playlist: Kansas

Kansas is big and broad and flat like an area rug with all the smell of cattle. Like any state we’ve visited, you have to know where to look to keep yourself entertained. But the distance between those locales need some road music. Here’s three songs for the Sunflower State. And, no, I am not including anything by the band Kansas.

Playlist: Iowa

It’s our second time through the Hawkeye state and since I missed the playlist the first time, here’s an offering of some really solid tunes to get us through until Kansas.

Playlist: North Dakota

Yeah, there’s not a ton to see here. And honestly, there’s not a lot to hear about around these parts either, which is why we are clipping through the corner of the Roughrider State just enough to visit Teddy Roosevelt NP.

The Badlands of Nebraska, North and South Dakota

We thundered our way through three states, making haste to meet our friends at Happy Productions in Minnesota. A set of bad valve cover seals had me spraying an oil slick out from behind the bus and the highways through North Dakota are long. Like really long. But each of these three states—Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota—had their own brand of Badlands.

Tour de Detour

One last song