Podcasts round-up: The perfect companions on a long road trip

Driving the Green Book Apple, Stitcher

Nomads at the Intersections
Apple, Spotify, Stitcher

Atlas Obscura Podcast
Apple, Spotify, Stitcher

 From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Hunter S Thompson’s Leaving Las Vegas to Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the road trip has a romantic, existential quality that’s impossible to resist.

Route 66, the Pacific Highway and Australian outback might have to wait for another year but whether you’re motoring along the Wild Atlantic Way or across continental Europe this summer, here are three road-worthy podcasts.

Dubbed the “bible of Black travel”, The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide first published in 1936 to help people of colour safely navigate America, a racially segregated country where even the North had “sundown towns”: nightly curfews for African-Americans.

It was compiled by black postman Victor Hugo Green and listed roadside businesses – gas stations, lodgings, diners, barber shops – that would welcome black customers.

“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” Green wrote. “It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please and without embarrassment.” 

The book came out of print in 1967, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and Driving the Green Book is broadcaster Alvin Hall and activist Janée Woods Weber’s compelling podcast that follows in Green’s 21st century automobile tyres as they drive from Detroit to New Orleans. 

You saw Nomadland, read the book, bought the RV. But did you listen to The Women on the Road podcast? Running until 2020, it was the brainchild of Laura Borichevsky who interviewed 100 female road drivers about their alternative lifestyle, asking what they were escaping from and whether reinvention is truly possible.

Over time it changed its name to On the Road, Our Way – the archive online – before relaunching completely as Nomads at the Intersections with new presenters Anaïs Monique and Noami Grevemberg at the wheel, sharing diverse female voices from the nomadic community.

Atlas Obscura is bookmarked on many a web browser for its oddball travel tips (taxidermy museums, graves). Its podcast can be equally eccentric/eclectic, such as an episode on Josephine Baker’s château in the Dordogne Valley, Northern Lebanon’s Baalbek Trilithon – one of the world’s best-preserved but least-known Roman ruins – and a decommissioned nuclear power plant in Long Island, NY.