Kerouacs Cruising | Reinvention on the Road

Podcast by James & Cara Kerouac

Kerouacs Cruising | Reinvention on the Road

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.

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Latest episodes

27 October 2026

The Long Way Home | Free Camping from Idaho to the Grand Canyon

Eighteen degrees, a dead battery, and hard ice at 7 AM.

That's how one morning on our drive home from Idaho to Arizona started, and it's only one stop on a week of camping across four states. We camped on the Clark Fork River in Idaho, in a snowy canyon just outside Dillon, Montana, at Piute Reservoir in Utah, and among the red rock beehives at Lake Powell, then rolled through the Grand Canyon on the last day. Along the way there's a duck boat with a homemade mud motor (The boys shot zero ducks), a two-hour standstill in the snow, Starlink that works even when it's pointed the wrong way, and a couple at Lake Powell with a photo from 2023 that stopped us both.

Then we pulled off at the Grand Canyon's East Rim to see what's really happening with the water situation, from the ground.

Planning a trip through Montana, Utah, or Northern Arizona? The chapters have every stop. And if you've been riding along for a while, our first Piute Reservoir episode is here: https://kerouacscruising.alitu.com/episode/2fea77f3-8557-42b1-aa64-5c07fab50c39. The Drift Yard has shown up on the show before too, in A Broken Shifter, Wildfires & a Blessing in Disguise: https://kerouacscruising.alitu.com/episode/9f961efb-f9fa-45e9-8c12-435c7134e3ad

If a week like this has you wondering what it would take to build a life that looks more like yours, that question has a home. We're working through it together at The Reinvention Project: kerouacscruising.com/reinvention

Want to talk it through first? A Connection Call is free and a full hour. It isn't a sales call, it's where we figure out together whether something more personal makes sense for you: https://calendar.app.google/5A86yjz11VATNEsB8

Notes for clarity:

We said Hoover Dam went up in the 1920s. It was actually built between 1931 and 1936.
We called it "Glen Dam." Lake Powell sits behind Glen Canyon Dam, finished in 1963. The flow through the Grand Canyon is set by releases from Glen Canyon Dam upstream. Hoover Dam is downstream, at Lake Mead.
On the Grand Canyon timeline: the park is targeting November 16 to start pumping and a gradual return of overnight visitors around Thanksgiving. It's not full operations, and every date is still tentative.
The "100-year flood year" we mentioned comes from the farmers' almanacs and from locals, not from an official forecast.

Find us everywhere: linktr.ee/kerouacscruising

And if the show's worth something to you, Ko-fi keeps the wheels turning: https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising

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20 October 2026

A Detective of the Body | Embodiment and the Subconscious Mind

Allison Pagano grew up in a house full of police officers. Every one of them a detective.

She became one too. Just not the kind anybody expected.

She's spent thirty years working out how people actually change, and her answer is not the one most of us were handed. We're taught that healing happens by thinking about it. Understanding where it came from, naming it, talking it through. And then you understand it perfectly, and you do the same thing again on Tuesday.

Allison's work starts somewhere else entirely. She calls it embodied dance, and underneath the name it's a method for finding what your body is holding about a thing, letting it move, and making a new choice from there.

We got into why nobody wants to feel, and what she says happens when you try to pick out just the good ones. We got into the part of your mind that's running underneath all of this, keeping you safe by keeping you familiar, even when familiar is exactly what you're trying to leave.

And James talked about growing up with masculinity pounded into him, and his sister handed Barbie dolls, and neither of them were given both.

There's a moment near the end where Allison says the thing that reframes the whole conversation. We're not going to put it here.

If you've been working on yourself for years and you're still meeting the same wall, this one's for you.

Allison's masterclass, The Six Keys of Leading as a Healing Dance Facilitator, and her shorter offering, Body as Authority, are both Here.

We're in the middle of this exact subject in The Reinvention Project right now. A free class runs every third Thursday, and the whole arc this month is about why knowing better doesn't make you do better. kerouacscruising.com/monthlyclass

And if something here landed and you want to talk it through, that’s what the Connection Call is for. Free, 1 hour. It’s where we work out together whether something more personal is the right fit. Book a time.

Sources for the science in this episode are in the links below.

Everything else we're doing is here. And if the show's worth something to you, Ko-fi keeps it running.

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13 October 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 is a National Memorial. Glen Canyon is a National Recreation Area, though Rainbow Bridge National Monument sits inside it, so Cara was closer than she thought. The Lincoln Memorial is a memorial. Vermilion Cliffs and the Statue of Liberty 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.

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. You don't have to be sure to start. We weren't.

Want to talk to us directly? Book a Connection Call — it's free, and it's just a conversation.

Find everything else at our Linktree, and if the show's been good to you, there's always Ko-fi.

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06 October 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," 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

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 Outdoor lightning safety (NWS) — https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-outdoors

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29 September 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.

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22 September 2026

The Onset of the Sacred | Finding Your Full Voice with Barbara McAfee

She said she needs to be ridden by the gods before she can really teach.

Barbara McAfee has been helping people find their full voice for over 30 years, and she means something much bigger than how you sound. She means the version of you that stopped being heard somewhere along the way. The one that got careful, got quiet, got told it couldn't sing.

In this conversation, Barbara walks us through her five elements framework (earth, fire, water, metal, air) and what happens when you finally let the sounds that got stuck inside you come out. We get into the Morning Star Singers, the volunteer hospice choir she's been leading for 19 years. We talk about stage fright, perfectionism, and why Barbara now interprets that anticipatory terror as the onset of the sacred rather than evidence that she should stop.

James talks about Kristen. About his mother.

And Barbara says something neither of us will forget: I would rather hear something true than something perfect.

Barbara's upcoming Full Voice Fundamentals class runs November 9 through December 7, five 90-minute sessions, limited to nine people, $249. If this conversation pulled at something in you, that's a real place to go. [barbaramcafee.com]

Her books:

Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence [barbaramcafee.com]
Vocal Intelligence (audiobook includes over an hour of music) [barbaramcafee.com]

The Reinvention Project is where we do this kind of work every Thursday. Free class the third Thursday of every month, a weekly Circle if you want company in it, or book a call if you'd prefer something deeper.

Find us everywhere: linktr.ee/kerouacscruising

Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising

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