Kerouacs Cruising

About Kerouacs Cruising

We left the plan behind to find out who we'd be without it. Travel is how we're doing it. The inner work is what it's actually about. Every Tuesday we put out an honest conversation from wherever we happen to be parked. Breaking the mold you've been living inside. Learning to trust yourself again. Figuring out what you actually want once nobody's around to tell you what to want. Some weeks that looks like a mountain pass and a campfire. Some weeks it looks like a blown engine and a hard conversation in the front seat. We're not doing this from the other side of it. We're doing it now, out loud, while it's still messy. If you've been quietly wondering whether the life you're living is actually yours, pull up a chair.

Publisher

James & Cara Kerouac

Category

religion & spirituality · science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 May 2024

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 130 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   13 Oct 2026

   Polar Bears, Pizza, and a Smoking Truck | Road Trip Table Topics

   The truck started smoking on the interstate about twelve minutes in. We were on our way back from Wyoming, towing a boat, deep into a round of road trip table topics, when Cara stopped mid-sentence and James said the two words nobody wants to hear in a moving vehicle. We pulled over. A guy on his phone nearly rear-ended us in the breakdown lane. We limped two miles to a Pilot and let it cool. And then it got fixed. Actually fixed, we think, for the first time in close to a year. The rest of the episode is what it was supposed to be. Table topics, which is the thing we do every once in a while where we answer off-the-wall questions and end up somewhere we didn't plan on going. How many national monuments have you actually seen? Your favorite fast food. One holiday to keep for the rest of your life. That last one went somewhere neither of us expected, and so did the one about our favorite trip. There's also a merry-go-round story, a playground Cara wasn't allowed to go to, and a disagreement about whether penguins live in Alaska. Note for clarity: we were guessing wildly on the national monuments, and we were wrong more often than we were right. Mount Rushmore (https://www.nps.gov/moru/index.htm) is a National Memorial. Glen Canyon (https://www.nps.gov/glca/index.htm) is a National Recreation Area, though Rainbow Bridge National Monument (https://www.nps.gov/rabr/index.htm) sits inside it, so Cara was closer than she thought. The Lincoln Memorial is a memorial. Vermilion Cliffs (https://www.nps.gov/places/vermilion-cliffs-national-monument.htm) and the Statue of Liberty (https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm) are both genuinely National Monuments, which means we hedged on the two we got right and were certain about the ones we got wrong. The show with the moose walking through town is Northern Exposure, not Northern Lights. And Cara was right about the penguins. Wall Drug comes up again, because it keeps coming up. The full backstory is in We Almost Drove Past It | Badlands, Wall Drug, and the Road Through South Dakota (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrOvmYvmiBY). Somewhere in the middle of this one, Cara answers the favorite-vacation question with the first trip we ever took as Kerouacs Cruising. No trailer, no Starlink, everything we owned in a utility trailer, sleeping in the car in bear country, bickering most of the way. She calls it the turning point. Not because it went well. Because it was the trip where we decided we were going no matter what. If you're somewhere near a decision like that and you can't see the other side of it yet, that's the whole thing we're working on over at The Reinvention Project (https://kerouacscruising.com/reinvention). You don't have to be sure to start. We weren't. Want to talk to us directly? Book a Connection Call (https://kerouacscruising.com) — it's free, and it's just a conversation. Find everything else at our Linktree (https://linktr.ee/kerouacscruising), and if the show's been good to you, there's always Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising).

2. 

   6 Oct 2026

   I Didn't Want to Look Paranoid | Free Camping on the Yellowstone

   We'd driven past it five or six times and never once looked. Itch-Kep-Pe Park sits right on the Yellowstone River in Columbus, Montana, half an hour from either Billings or Bozeman. It's free for ten days. It has a fire pit, a picnic table, a rope swing, and a real porcelain toilet with a real sink, which is not a thing you expect from free dispersed camping. We've been driving to Red Lodge for years, and it never once crossed our minds to stop. This week we're in a tent instead of the camper, because we're towing a duck boat across three states for James's son. And that tent is where the trouble starts. Four air mattresses have now failed us in a row. Four. Including the one that survived ten days in Death Valley. We ended up flat on the ground, and James woke at 2:30 with a hand he couldn't feel. Then the second half of this one happens at night, in the truck, with both dogs, while a storm that was supposed to be a ten percent chance of a tenth of an inch throws lightning at the river. There's a moment in there we almost cut. Cara sat down in that tent during the storm, knowing better, because she didn't want to be the person who overreacted. If you've ever talked yourself out of your own instincts to avoid looking like a lot, you already know how that sentence ends. Note for clarity: James says metal attracts lightning. It doesn't. The National Weather Service is direct about this: metal makes no difference at all to where lightning strikes, and height, pointy shape, and isolation decide it. Which actually explains the story better than the myth does, because a tin hut on an exposed ridge above tree line is all three of those things at once. Metal does conduct electricity once a strike happens, so staying off fences and railings in a storm is still good advice. The rest of what we said holds: a hard-topped vehicle is safe shelter, and a tent offers no protection whatsoever. Sources at the bottom. Second note: the mountain range Cara couldn't name is the Absaroka. The campground we mention: [LINK — "Red Lodge Adventures: Free Camping at Willow Creek, Cheesesteaks & Road Trip Lessons (https://kerouacscruising.alitu.com/episode/dc2b3186-3fe1-4046-802e-9be2a184edf8)," August 25, 2025.] We called it Pleasant View in the episode, but the spot is Palisades Campground, and it can be hard to find on your own, so bookmark this if you're heading to Beartooth Pass. If you've been the person sitting still in a storm because moving would have made you look dramatic, that's not a personality flaw, and it isn't nothing. It's a story about how you'd be seen, running faster than the thing you actually knew. We're pulling at that one all month over at The Reinvention Project. Come as you are, and come find us at kerouacscruising.com/reinvention. Want to just talk instead? A free Connection Call, no pitch, 45 minutes: https://calendar.app.google/5A86yjz11VATNEsB8 (https://calendar.app.google/5A86yjz11VATNEsB8) Find everything else at linktr.ee/kerouacscruising Buy us a coffee at ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising Lightning safety, straight from the source: Lightning myths (NWS) — https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-myths (https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-myths) Outdoor lightning safety (NWS) — https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-outdoors (https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-outdoors)

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   The Family I Never Asked For | Foster Sisters and Finding Home

   Katie has been in Cara's life since the fifth grade. When everything fell apart in high school, hers was the first phone number Cara thought of, and what her family did next changed the shape of Cara's whole life. This week Katie came to Idaho for the first time, and two halves of Cara's life met each other. We also get into what's actually happening at the Grand Canyon after the flood, why the South Rim has no water, and what the people who work there are living with right now. Plus a boat that isn't supposed to be able to sink, and a trip we decided on the day before we left.

Inside a recent episode

Drive Your Bus: Quieting the Inner Critic with Dr. Margaret Cochran

Published 17 Dec 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] There's only power available. So a really good exercise for that is take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and with your dominant hand, write questions to your little guy. And with your non-dominant hand, use a pencil or a crayon or whatever you want and let him answer you. Now, the reason why that's such a very powerful exercise is, as you're probably both aware, the brain is cross-wired. So you're literally talking to the other half of your brain. And mostly that half of your brain was shut off for protection reasons. Your creativity, your intuition, your sensitivity, all that stuff, that was dangerous when you were growing up. […]

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

4.2 / 5

5 ratings

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