I just took a new job as a reporter in a town about 75 miles from my home. I’m just out of college and the pay is incredibly bad (don’t ask) so I can’t afford to move right now. I have a new car (bright red Ford Focus, all the options, my baby!!!), so the mechanical part of the drive is not a problem. My real question is if anyone has advice for the mental part. Anyone else out there with a major daily commute who can share experiences or ideas for making the best of the time on the road? I’d love to hear from the teeming millions. Thanks y’all.
My dad gets a lot of books on tape.
I got a bunch of Learn to Speak German tapes…
I think you may as well learn something while you’re just sitting there for hours.
Books on Tape - helped me survive many a trek along I-95 between Florida and Virginia. I used to check them out of the library. Some were incredibly bad, so I had a few laughs. It beat the radio by a long shot.
Books on tape saved my life when I was driving a similar distance to attend college.
You can usually check them out at the library and buy them used if you have a good used book store near you.
Carpool.
Get a cell phone and call JimB. That’s what I do to make my 30 minute drive bearable. 
I also listen to audio books. You can check them out at the public library or pick some up pretty cheap at garage sales and the used bookstore. I have a few (mystery/suspense) that I bought and listened to already. You’re welcome to 'em.
You beat me to that one, Grace.
Since my commute is 6 paces down the hall and make a left, I really don’t have much to offer. But my ex used to do like Grace, listen to audio books, not the call me part.
Jim
My mom swears by audiobooks. Personally, I’ve never tried them.
Now that I’ve started to spend a lot more time in my car, I’ve taken to burning custom CDs from stuff I get on Bearshare and Limewire. I use WinAmp’s WAV writer to turn the MP3s into WAVs and then burn them to CD using EZ-CD Creator. I’ve developed a few thematic CDs (live acoustic music, driving music, classic heavy metal) that help pass the time.
When I used to commute by car, I also tried call-in contests on the radio via my cell phone. I won some cool stuff like concert tickets and free meals at restaurants that way.
I have a good friend who dictates thoughts into a small tape recorder when he drives. Not stupid Norm MacDonald stuff, but writing ideas. He develops entire characters and plots and dictates them while he’s driving, then transcribes them when he gets in front of a laptop. Considering I get a lot of good ideas when I’m driving, taking a shower, or performing other mundane tasks, I thought this was a good idea.
For the 1st five miles weave back and forth on the road like in NASCAR to warm your tires. After driving as fast as possible for 35 miles stop for gas and new tires (even if you don’t need them). For the second leg of the trip make sure you draft atleast three people. Finally when you get to work spray champagne all over you arriving co-workers!
It might help if you put stickers all over your car.
Is your commute during normal morning and afternoon drive time? If so you should be able to hear the news on NPR. I had a 40-minute commute, each way, at one time and the news kept my mind occupied. For longer trips I have listened to books on tape, too. They’re fun! Some come unabridged, which means the whole entire book read word for word.
Ellen, a former reporter! 
I’m a fiction writer, so when I’m stuck in the car driving to godforsaken Toledo or something, I’ll talk out loud to my ‘characters’ and interview them about the story they’re involved in. It helps me to get stuff bubbling in my head, and then I can write it down when I stop.
And man oh man do I love sports talk radio.
jarbaby
Get Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth on audiotape. It’s ten tapes, 30 hours, each tape is doubly-recorded so you listen to each tape first with the balance all on the left and then with the balance all on the right.
Jesus mary and joseph and I thought READING it was a chore
rather than books on tape (ick), I download NPR programs from http://www.audible.com and listen to them as I drive. This American Life and Car Talk are my favorites. It’s nice since you can start it and stop it on an mp3 player without missing anything (you know those adapters you plug into the headphone jack of a CD player to listen to it on the car’s tape deck? They work for mp3 players too).
You can also download news.
And once, on a long drive my friend and I went through the entire “100 bottles of beer on the wall” song just to see if we could.
Gotta agree with Books on Tape. I used them when I had a short commute – now mine is as bad as yours. Points to consider:
1.) Your local library probably has a set of books on tape. Use them. It will save you big bucks. Also, many libraries are parts of consortia. You may be able to take books on tape out of surrounding libraries.
2.) If you buy a book on tape, make sure it’s one you’re going to like hearing over and over. I find that Classics, History, and Nonfiction fit the bill. I only like hearing fiction over and over if I REALLY like it (Sherlock Holmes, Mark Twain, etc.) If you find that you have books on tape you don’t listen to any more, retire them temporarily, or donate them to the library.
3.) I find that I like epics – these things were MADE to be listened to, after all. The Robert Fagles translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are killers. I also have Beowulf and The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Aeneid and the Argonautica. Joseph Campbell on myth is good, too. (I write about myth as a sideline, so these are right up my alley.) Also, The Handmaid’s Tale is, according to its own (fictional) account, transcribed from audio tapes, so listening to it on audio tape adds an extra dimension. I find that I catch things when listening to a story that I miss while reading it.
4.) You can make your own tapes by reading a book/magazine into a tape recorder. You can also dub tapes from VHS or a DVD player, so you can “listen to” a TV show or a movie.
Sorry in advance for advice you won’t like, but: Find another job or move. Since you said the pay is crummy, I suggest a new job. You only get so many hours in this life. If you need more money you can get an extra job. If you need more love, you can find friends or a SO or whatever. But you can’t get more time. Nothing is more precious than time.
Sit down and do the math about how many hours of your life will be lost this year driving. Then consider taking a better paying job closer to home. The two hours a day you’re wasting add up to a lot. With two hours a day extra you can do huge things towards advancing your career or enjoying life, or whatever else it is that makes your current job so desirable.
I sort of agree with Bill – except I say get a tiny little efficiency apartment and keep the job. I also worked for a little daily at one time and learned to my chagrin, while covering the housing authority board, that I qualified…
THespos, I hope you see the problem with dictating your wonderful ideas while in the shower.
I used to feel the same way. I’ve always loved reading, books as physical objects, etc. My wife’s abridged romance novels on tape did nothing to change my mind.
Then I started having to spend an hour and a half in the car every day. No CD player, bored with all my cassettes, tired of talk radio, no use at all for commercial radio, and classical music on NPR just wasn’t holding my attention. So I decided to try some unabridged books on tape from the library. Since I had very little time to read with two small children in the house, I decided that I’d use it as a chance to “read” some things that I’d been interested in but couldn’t devote my attention to at home. What I found was that almost anything produced by Recorded Books, Inc. was very good to brilliant, while almost anything else was bad to horrible. They don’t tart up the readings with music or sound effects or anything like that, but what makes them outstanding is the quality of the readers they employ. They’re actors, but not household-name actors doing books-on-tape on a lark or for some extra bucks for lease payments on the Rolls. They’re actors who are almost all extremely gifted at reading. Perhaps the best (my favorite, at any rate) is Patrick Tull. Among other things, he’s read the entire Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series of novels (twenty, in all), most of the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael novels, John Mortimer’s Rumpole novels and stories, a lot of Sherlock Holmes stuff, quite a bit of Dickens and Orwell, and lots more. He’s stunningly good; he succeeds at conveying the differences between characters through speech mannerisms that make it immediately evident which character is talking, he’s quite adept at a wide range of accents (particularly important for the O’Brian books, which range all over the world with characters to match), and his readings of narrative passages effectively convey the tone of the passage, all without ever being over-the-top or strained. I’ve been through the entire Aubrey/Maturin series once and am on the ninth book on my second pass, and have listened to most of the Brother Cadfael series, all of the Rumpole books, as well as Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and a smattering of others. The really amazing thing is that Tull himself completely disappears in his readings, so that you’re never aware of him; you genuinely feel as though you’re listening to the narrator or the characters of the books – and his Rumpole is quite different from his Cadfael, which is quite different from his Jack Aubrey. Recorded Books has several other outstanding readers as well: George Guidall, Alexander Spencer (quite good on P.G. Wodehouse), John Randolph Jones, etc. I’ve enjoyed listening to them so much that I’m actually a little disappointed that my commuting days will end, at least for a while, at the end of the month when I officially change over to working from home.
I wish I could say the same about the books on tape from other companies that I’ve tried, but with a very few exceptions they’ve been hardly worth the time at best, and unlistenable at worst. I was particularly disappointed with the Chivers productions of several P.G. Wodehouse works; in every case, the readers were so bad that I didn’t get much beyond the first few minutes.
I had to drive about an hour to and from my school everyday. It’s all about the huge cup of coffee and the music. Bring some good CDs, crank up the stereo, and act like you’re the best singer in the world. You’ll have time to learn all the songs you never knew.
…and if all else fails, get a really good cell phone rate plan and a friend that will want to talk to you for a few hours every morning and evening.
