Is It Time For A Radio ROAD TRIP?!

Here we are, in the ides of July, and it’s time to embrace this fast-fleeting summer of 2025. For many of us, this means baseball outings, family picnics and barbeques, and time doing nothing on a nearby lake.

If you’re like 80% of families in America, a road trip is on your agenda this summer. According to NACA, the National Association of Convenience Stores, road tripping with family and friends is an integral part of the summer routine for so many of us. (Yes, diarykeepers and meter panelists, too.)

For me, it harkens back 50 years ago this summer when yours truly, along with the late, great Larry Estlack took a 3-week road trip across America, starting in Williamston, Michigan, and driving through Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, along with breathtaking stopovers that included Rocky Mountain National Park and the Colorado National Monument.

With the exception of one night when we simply caved and stayed at a motel, we camped out the other 20 evenings of this sojourn. And when I tell you “glamping” was not yet invented, take me at my word.

The variables that may have separated our trip from yours any given year was that we made the trek in Larry’s new Nepal Orange Porsche 914. Now Larry was a big man, and the Porsche was a small two-seater, so we were a tad cramped.

Unlike the typical passenger seat navigator, my job was a little more complex. I had a copy of the Broadcast Yearbook on my lap. Published every year, it was a phone book-sized listing containing every broadcast radio station in the U.S., categorized by state, and then by city and town.

My mission? Look a few pages ahead on our AAA “Triptik” to see what berg we’d be driving through in an hour or so, and find interesting radio stations to listen to as we could receive them on the Porsche’s standard radio. No, the Garmin GPS and Google Maps app had not been invented.

On this trip, we got to hear them all in real time—small town AM stations carrying versions of “Tradio”—how people bought and sold stuff before eBay or Facebook Marketplace. They’d go on the air to describe the bathtub, dining room table, or tricycle people wished to sell. And the radio station would hook them up with interested buyers.

There was no prerecording, on-demand shows, broadcasting from home, or any of today’s time/money-savers that have sadly helped make radio stations sound less in the moment as well as more removed from the communities they’ve been licensed to serve.

And we also happened across great radio stations like WLS and WCFL in Chicago, doing battle in what were called “pushbutton wars,” as well as prominent AM and FMs in every city and community we drove through.

In addition to seeing a large swath of America that summer, we heard a fascinating potpourri of what radio sounded like back in 1975.  And to a fledgling radio guy, it was a great education.

So, I did a double-take when I heard about an innovative game that recently was the topic of a feature on Here & Now, WBUR’s (Boston) popular newsmagazine, carried by NPR. Host Robin Young interviewed the manager of a small college station in Bowdoin, Maine—WBOR, Mason Daugherty—where the game originally launched.

Mason was one of the forces behind a new game the station launched not long ago, “The Internet Roadtrip.” (Mason has since graduated.) Players simply log on and collectively vote on the direction the game’s virtual car will take—and which radio station the group collectively listens to on the current phase of the journey.

That last part is key because when Mason’s station was chosen, the volume of streaming on WBOR was epic, melting down its servers.

You can listen to the Hear & Now story here. Here’s a look at the dashboard, accessible 24/7 at neal.fun

This is a screen-grab from earlier today. As you can see the current location of this Internet road trip is Tadoussac, Canada, somewhere in the province of Quebec. In the upper-right, you can see how many participants are online, and how many are voting to “drive” the virtual car. There’s also an ongoing chat, along with the opportunity to listen to a little radio (bottom right).

Here’s a one-minute YouTube Shorts video that will give you a better sense for the road trip community that has formed around the game:

Now think about the possibility of licensing a version of this game via the creator OR developing a version on your own, perhaps “geofenced’ by your state or region. The possibilities for advertising (think “product placement”) on your road trip are endless. And members of your airstaff could star as “designated drivers,” chatting with other participants in the community as well as drawing attention to POIs along the journey.

I know a certain app development team that might enjoy creating a version for a state broadcast association or even a network of public or Christian radio stations (“Dashboard Jesus” sold separately).

As the game’s inventor, Neal Agarwal proves—and as we see at Eureka Park each year at CES—the next big idea is just a brainstorm away from happening. And it can come from anywhere. 

Maybe you’ll even dream up something cool on that next road trip.

“Test drive” the game here.