Wanderlusting, Road Tripping Music

I love and hate road trips. I think anyone who regularly travels knows this feeling well. The actual act of traveling is always a thrill in itself. There's nothing like laying eyes on new vistas and towns for the first time, but if you're anything like me, the expansive cornfields and broken down towns can be wearing. After years of experience, I've come up with a short list of the best road trip songs, which also seem to work well if you have a life-crisis and decide to leave everything and drive to Tijuana, whichever comes first. The list, like me, favors music from the 60's and 70's, but hang in there! I swear there's some modern stuff!

• Ramble On - Led Zeppelin

It took me forever to appreciate LZ.  I just couldn't get into Robert Plant's voice on some songs, but I don't care who you are, Ramble On makes you want to drive into the sunset. Pay close attention to the Lord of the Rings references, you'll giggle.

Ramble on and now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song

I'm going around the world, I got to find my girl, on my way
I've been this way ten years to the day ramble on
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams

• Highway Chile - Jimi Hendrix

I'm a HUGE Hendrix fan! Jimi has a lot of "on the road" songs, so I could have filled this whole post with them, but I took the most fitting. The song is semi-autobiographical, so you can easily picture a young Jimi strolling down the road, thumb in hitchhike position.

Yeah, his guitar slung across his back
His dusty boots is his cadillac
Flamin' hair just a blowin' in the wind
Ain't seen a bed in so long it's a sin
He left home when he was seventeen
The rest of the world he had longed to see
But everybody knows the boss
A rolling stone who gathers no moss

• Up Around the Bend - Credence Clearwater Revival

I was going back and forth between which CCR song I was going to add.  Sweet Hitchhiker was also a top contender. Up Around the Bend not only stokes the image of running away into something simpler and more beautiful, it warns us, Alexander Supertramp style, that the mainstream is going down fast.

There's a place up ahead and
I'm going just as fast as my feet can fly
Come away, come away if you're going,
Leave the sinking ship behind. 

• Take the Money and Run - Steve Miller

I swear, it's my last pick from the 60's or 70's.   Admittedly, Steve Miller and CCR make up about half my road trip music. I think I was born in the wrong era. Take the Money and Run though is one of my classic favorites. I swear, there's no other song that puts a smile on my face like this one.

This here's a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here is what happened when they decided to cut loose

• Fly Away - Lenny Kravitz

Fly Away is the wanderlust anthem.  Driving guitar and a liberating rhythm, Lenny captures the spirit of free spiritedness.

I wish that I could fly
Into the sky
So very high
Just like a dragonfly
I'd fly above the trees
Over the seas in all degrees
To anywhere I please

• Mountain Sound - Of Monsters and Men

I know, I know, you've heard it a thousand times, but it still needs to be part of any adventure's soundtrack, particularly one into the mountains.

I heard them calling in the distance
So I packed my things and ran
Far away from all the trouble
I had caused with my two hands
Alone we travelled armed with nothing but a shadow
We fled, far away

• Conga - The Holidays

Australian Indie rock has never produced a better group than The Holidays. Conga's hypnotic and mellow beat will take you home for the final stretch of the trip. The positive lyrics will see you through life with a smile on the face.

Have you told them, have you told them
About our place where skies are golden
Life is free
Beneath the trees

• Runaway - The Real McCoy

90's. Anti-establishment. Dance music.....more than enough said.

Money, sex in full control, a generation without soul
Perfect people in a perfect world,
Behind closed doors all in control
Life, in a world of luxury,
Cold cash money mentality
You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith
You'd better keep the faith and run away


I have more songs I could recommend, but top-10 lists are cliche, so I think a top 8 is awkwardly perfect. Cheers!

Lost and Found in Ithaca

Despite my absence from the blog and the mountains, I actually have been quite active.  Living in Ithaca has its perks.  I live 20 miles or less to what many will travel across the state to see.  Ithaca may not be surrounded by the peaks I prefer, but the gorges, glens and waterfalls more than make up for it....well, almost.

After losing my phone I was nervous my most recent hikes would be lost.  I'm going back and forth over taking a trip to Colorado for a couple months, so I wouldn't see the gorges again until they were back in their autumn splendor.  The fall colors are breathtaking, but the sole benefit of having weeks of never ending rain is that the rivers are swollen and their cascades rage pretty furiously.  Thank Guinness for Instagram!  I lost some photos, but at least a few memories were saved, like massive Lucifer Falls at Robert Treman Park,

and the enchanting serenity of Fillmore Glenn, just outside of Ithaca,

and of course, one of many trips to Taughannock falls.

With any luck I'll gather the courage and resources to leap into the unknown for a while and finally spend time in mountain sound of the Rockies, but even if I do, I'll miss summer in the Republic of Ithaca.

Syriacuse: From Handguns to Hope

I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I launched the blog: yikes! Firstly, I haven't been to the mountains in over half the year (typing that makes me feel faint).  Secondly, I've been continuing to enjoy the natural and cultural beauty of Ithaca.  I've hiked and biked all through the area.....and then I lost my phone with all my pictures.  No, I don't want to talk about it.

So far, 2015 has been kind of a dud.  The winter was truly vicious.  I remember looking up the temperature atop Mount Marcy during a cold snap in February (the coldest Feb on record) and the high for the day was only a few degrees warmer than Everest.  Despite record high temps in May, June ended up being one of the wettest and chilliest on record.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to July, or at least I was until this past weekend.  What should have been a weekend of BBQ's and Sangria erupted in 10 shootings thorough the city of Syracuse, about an hour north of Ithaca.  To put that in perspective, Chicago, a city just shy of 3 million people, saw 7 gun deaths in the same period.  These types of incidents led the city to dubbed Chiraq by some.  Syracuse, on the other hand, has a population of about 145,000; Syriacuse did not make CNN headlines.  Overall, crime has dipped in Syracuse like most other major cities throughout the last few decades, but incidences like this past weekend are still not all that uncommon.

While I was sifting through news on the shootings, I had suddenly had enough and just wanted to plan my next trip to the Adirondacks.  Along my flurry of Google searches I found an article about Mountain Lake Academy.  The academy is an experimental school that takes in at-risk teenage boys and exposes them to the glory of the ADKs along with academic training and community service.  My mind immediately began to fill with scenes of merry kids from urban and rural slums climbing peaks, kayaking and fishing, all free from the consumer-driven idiocy of pop culture, similar to Benton Mackaye's original vision for the Appalachian Trail. Whether MLA is Mackaye's "retreat from profit" with an academic twist, I'm not sure.  However, I am quite sure that institutions that focus on both natural beauty and intellectual enrichment, opposed to submission, have a much better shot of ending the war zone that plagues places like Syracuse...or Syria for that matter.

With that off my chest....the blog is back, I swear! My wanderlust is kicking in pretty badly, so I'm sure I'll have more trail antics and adventures to report soon!