Reading While on the Road?

Listening to audiobooks on road trips gets the whole family involved

One of our most recent selections for my trip to Texas with the kids - Photo by Sarah Styf

In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.

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I never considered the power of audiobooks until my husband Jeff started asking me to check out CDs from our local public library so that he could listen to books on his daily two-hour commute from our home in Northwest Indiana to Michigan. When we decided to take a week-long trip to Yellowstone, we found space in our little Ford Focus for at least three audiobooks. Jim Dale read Harry Potter to us on our way through Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. For the first time, I discovered just how powerful audiobooks could be as we listened to magical worlds unfold in our imaginations and very real glorious landscapes grow in front of our eyes.

I never looked down on audiobooks as “real” reading again.

Now audiobooks have become a regular part of my daily reading and learning diet. I alternate between podcast episodes and audiobooks when I’m commuting to school, running errands, doing housework, and exercising. And audiobooks are a regular part of our trip planning when we are making lists for trips that are longer than a couple of hours.

As parents, listening to audiobooks has allowed us to have shared experiences with our kids instead of them spending days on end completely plugged into devices while ignoring the passing landscape. We have been able to share some of our childhood favorites and as the kids have gotten older, they’ve been able to share their favorites with us, allowing us to converse about what they have been reading and giving us a chance to discuss when we discover content that challenges all of us.

And thanks to library apps (I use Libby with my local public library card) and paid apps like Audible (which we do pay for because not every audiobook is available through our library), we rarely have an excuse for not being able to find a book.

We’ve listened to nearly the entire Beverly Cleary collection and laughed through How to Eat Fried Worms. We made our daughter cry during Where the Red Fern Grows and raced through Land of Stories and Percy Jackson. We discovered that the I Survived series was just as entertaining as our son kept claiming it was and I rediscovered the powerful storytelling in The Worst Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Yes, our kids still pull out their tablets and now phones to play games, watch movies, and send messages to their friends. Yes, sometimes the driver needs a break from the selected book and turns on music to stay more alert. No, the books don’t always engage us as much as we would like them to. But by the end of nearly every vacation, I am able to add at least a handful of new books to my Goodreads list and our brains have been engaged in more than just online video games.

And this hasn’t just been something that we have done with our children. In the years since having kids, when Jeff and I have taken road trips alone, we have found our own adult audiobooks to keep us entertained. On an anniversary road trip to New Orleans, we shuddered through the revelations in The Devil in the White City and I had to pause Concussion multiple times on the same trip to pontificate about all of my feelings related to what I was learning about CTE. Last year we finally purchased The Stand on Audible so that we could listen to it together while we ran errands or walked the dogs, taking nearly six months to finish a book that was over 50 hours long. We weren’t just using books to bond with our children; we used books to get even closer to each other.

Using audiobooks while on road trips of any length has helped us bond as a family, grow together, and learn more about the world and each other. It has become about far more than preventing vacation learning loss and instead has opened up our hearts and minds to the world around us as we explore. I hope that it can do the same for you.

Final note: I am including a link to the list of audiobooks that we have enjoyed over the last several years with age appropriateness. Please check the descriptions of the books before you decide that it is right for your family.

Our list is here. Please feel free to make a copy for yourself and share your favorite road trip audiobooks in the comments.

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