Welcome to another week of life on the road. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband.
This week, we’re in Durham, North Carolina, enjoying a house to ourselves and the sweet, southern sound of crickets at night.
It’s fall and I can feel it. The earlier sunsets have me edging away from staying up long past midnight and back toward a normal sleep schedule. There’s a chill in the air, even when it’s bright and sunny. I unpacked my hoodie for the first time in several months instead of just leaving it in the suitcase.
We moved again, leaving Montreal for North Carolina with a full two days of driving. When we drove through Scranton, Pennsylvania and its neighboring cities, I figured out yet another fix for my mountain panic—the dark! Driving through the mountains in the dark is one way to quell my nerves because I can’t see any drop-offs. (This wouldn’t work on tiny mountain roads, that sounds terrifying and dangerous, but for highways with lots of lanes, it did.)
If I’m honest, I don’t know what to write about this week. There’s been a good bit going on, but all in the realm of my personal life and not my travel life. Of course, my travel life is my personal life, and my writing touches on personal things. But there is still a distinction, albeit a blurry one, between the two. And right now, the personal things are not ones I’m writing about.
This is not an attempt to be cryptic, nor is it a veiled hint at sad or tragic things happening behind the scenes. It’s just that I’ve been making some plans and pursuing things that aren’t definite yet, and I’ve been helping family and friends through things that aren’t my story to tell, and we’re preparing for a good bit of family time in the next month with upcoming weddings and events. Life is happening, and it’s not travel-related.
Therein lies the issue of personal writing. When I first started this newsletter, I wrote my posts 1-2 weeks ahead of when they published. I cherry-picked moments from our experiences, wrote, and published them 2-4 weeks after they happened. Now, I’m almost always writing the Sunday before Tuesday publishing, wracking my brain for the most recent, entertaining anecdote. And I sat down today, after a full weekend of driving through two Canadian provinces and five US states, just to realize I didn’t have a travel story to tell.
Instead of one big moment, I’ll share a few recommendations and tidbits from the last few weeks.
The Handsome Podcast: If you like conversational podcasts, and if you enjoy Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, or Mae Martin, I highly recommend their new podcast. Aaron and I have now listened to all the episodes that have been released so far, and I think it’s the happiest we’ve been to listen something together since our drive from LA to Flagstaff when we listened to Vacationland by John Hodgkin in its entirety. There you go, two recommendations in one, because I do also recommend Vacationland.
The Fourth Wing: This book has already been recommended by literally everyone else, but just in case you’ve been living under a rock without Wi-Fi, read this book. The second in the series comes out in early November, so it’s the perfect time. Not only is it a very fun, fantasy-romance with a female protagonist, but it has a surprisingly nuanced take on relationships and disability and really breaks a lot of the cliches of the genre.
If you’ve ever felt like doctor-recommended weight loss was too often bullshit but you didn’t have the numbers or explanation to prove it, you should read this piece by Ragen Chastain.
If you’re looking for better ways to reduce the sexism and gendered thinking that kids pick up so early in life, try this advice from Melinda Wenner Moyer.
A great piece about women, “clumsiness,” and gendered assumptions about ability.
If you want to read a delightful LGBTQ+ romance that centers around a home renovation TV show, try Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail.
If you want to read fun books about fat women living life, having great sex, and enjoying themselves (while, of course, caught up in romances and/or long-distance bike trips and/or murder mysteries), try pretty much any book by Jennifer Weiner. I’ve read Big Summer and The Breakaway so far, but I’ll be getting to the others soon enough.
And, as always, if you want to learn to crochet, try a Woobles kit! They aren’t paying for me ads, but I consider myself a spokesperson at this point.