This Plinky-provided topic is apropos after my recent trip. Kinda.

I love listening to music when travelling and Moe and I both sing along to the radio or one of our CDs. I remember taking trips with my parents singing along to 8-tracks and tapes and, later on, with friends and we always sang along to our mixed-tapes, too. A road trip without tunes just doesn't feel right.

My car is very basic. Seriously, it has no extras at all. There's no stereo. No radio. No jack for an ipod or mp3... Even if I owned one of those. Moe and I tried using a portable CD player and I found it irritated me because I could only hear the treble portions over the sound of the engine. It really, really irritated me.

So... When I make a solo road trip, I have no music except what I have in my head. Singing alone in the car without external music isn't too bad, except I've discovered that most of the songs I thought I knew off by heart all have large chunks in the middle where the lyrics sound a lot like: "Nah, nah, la, be la mumble the blah, blah, neh-na!" Strange. I could have sworn there was more actual words last time I heard it on the CD.

Shrugging off the oddity of losing the lyrics of the songs I'm certain I have memorized, I have complied a short list of the fundamental tunes I would choose to hear while travelling. This is the starter list and these are only representatives of their types. They are all easy to sing along to and are mostly cheerful, if not in content, then in tone. And they each remind me of a past road trip that seemed to end too soon.