"Hey ChatGPT, can you make me a Spotify playlist of summer jams that would be fun for me and for my 12-year-old travel buddy? The list should include rock, pop, R&B, reggae, and hip hop, but avoid country music in general. Spanish language songs are ok, too, of any genre. The songs should tend to be more recent, but may include some classics going back as far as the 1960s."
If I'd had time I would have put together a better playlist with a more diverse roster and a little less Bruno Mars (seriously, is he on every song? Ok, not really complaining, but other people are making music, right?). (Although actually my first update was replace one Bruno Mars with another so there you go.) But I didn't really have time, so I had the computer do it for me, and while the list was still more engaging that a normal radio station with only seven songs interrupted by too-loud commercial breaks, it was still definitely algorithmic. Luckily, "summer vibes" is a thing pop music specializes in, so even the slightly-above-mediocre list they gave me sounded pretty dang good on the highways of northern Spain.
After a chaotic and traumatic and very challenging six months, I decided that we had earned a break. Julian was in the States testing out a few weeks of independence, and Laura was settling in to her new role at the office, and that left me and Asa, who I have never taken a road trip with. We decided on Spain because we loved it, and Cantabria and Asturias because once I asked a Spaniard where in Spain I would find people like me and she said, "Asturias, definitely. Cantabria maybe." And that was enough for us, so we went. We rented a little car and dashed across the incredible Castilian fields (no pictures though cause I was driving and Asa was playing on his phone, but it was lovely, all golden fields punctuated by green bushes and fairytale villages--and ok, an unexpected amount of heavy industry but they did their best to keep those out of the way). Asa commandeered the radio while I was still learning how to turn the car on, and while his taste in music is excellent, it does lean towards quite dour things (my takeaway: modern rappers are all depressed). Whatever its merits, we can agree that "Sicko Mode" does not lend itself to tearing up the beach in a way that, say, "Steal My Sunshine" does.
Playlist complete, we drove on, enchanted with Spain, apprehensive but optimistic about our new lives, and pretty much stuffed full of churros.