Cut Your Travel Time In Half With Audio Books

I’m an avid fan of Business oriented audio books. I listen to them almost every day while driving or exercising. Quite a few are resident on my new iTouch.

Audio books provide Learning and Entertainment at the stroke of the play button. If you don’t have an iPod or other MP3 player, you can buy them in CD format and play them in your cars CD player.

In the past year I’ve listened to over 50 business titles, which works out to thousands of written pages in paper bound books. I’ve raved about audio books for the past two years and even developed another blog around them. I thought I knew all there was to know about them… until…

Until my wife and I took a driving trip from Southern California to Seattle, Washington. Our car has an XM radio which provided satellite radio coverage throughout the trip. I brought along my iPod with a cadre of audio book business titles and we had one additional item that a friend sent along.

This item was housed in a colorful little box and I didn’t realize the magical power it contained until half way through the trip. On our way back from Seattle, we open the package, undid the shrink wrap and popped the contents into our CD player.

The item was a Fiction Based Audio Book from Carl Hiaasin.

This magical little book did something that my wife and I had never experienced before…

It cut our perceived travel time in half.

This book was so interesting and the characters so outlandish, that it took us from the 5 freeway in Washington state and transported us to a small town in Florida. The freeway disappeared and the everglades appeared in our minds. Hours passed and the book drew us further in with mystery and intrigue.

Dear readers… I have never experienced anything like this before. It was like we were traveling hundreds of miles an hour. The time flew by and suddenly I was aware that we weren’t in Washington anymore. As I saw the sign that said welcome to Oregon, I realized that this book had transformed our trip.

Instead of dreading the 18 hour journey, we now found ourselves transformed by the voice of the narrator, and we had a hard time stopping since we both wanted to know what was coming next.

The audio book was about 6 hours in length and we listened to it in two or three sessions over the first day. It cut hours of perceived time from our travels and made an otherwise boring trip into an exciting adventure.

If you travel often by car, bus, or plane be sure to pick up an iPod and download some fiction based audio books. One book that I can highly recommend to all audiences, especially if you have kids along is Carl Hiaasin’s book Hoot. A story about a middle school boy and his adventures in Trace Middle School in humid Coconut Grove, Florida.

Beware… Once the barefooted running boy runs past you in the story… you won’t be able to stop listening!