Dreamed?!? Well let me make your dreams come true. Have you heard of radio garden? I found a station for you in Nashville, Tennessee. That's a pretty great place to find good country music.

http://radio.garden/listen/103wkdf/S7xSIpaS - In Nashville

http://radio.garden/listen/want-fm-98-9/2I82DH2y - Nearby in Lebanon, TN

If you want the truly authentic experience, stick to stations that have their four letter code in the title (starts with a W), because those are 100% real FM radio stations. Enjoy the authentic country music experience. As you head toward the central US, you'll find more and more country music.

Radio stations east of the Mississippi River start their stations with 'W', and stations west of the Mississippi with 'K'. So any call letters starting with K or W are real.

Thank for that call to action. I think that i will adopt radio garden forever!

That radio site/app is genius idea.

Thanks for great suggestions and kind words! For EU I'm experimenting with a special version called 3ur0p4. Same stuff, but you can only take public transport or a bicycle.

Funny. I just got back from a 3 month European road trip, basically following the Med coast from Gibraltar to Greece. Probably 15 times, people lectured me under the guise of a question "Why did you rent a car? Why not just take trains?", and maybe 10 times "That's so American".

But, I'm glad I did. Literally every one of my favorite experiences/places of the trip was completely inaccessible through public transit, and honestly I would not have even found those places or people if I wasn't driving around aimlessly. On top of that, every one of my least favorite experiences was in a place that was highly accessible to public transit, and mobbed with tourists.

You know what I'm not going to remember? Standing in a mob waiting for a train in Cinque Terre. Standing in a mob in Rome looking at the Vatican. Standing in a mob in Dubrovnik while "Game of Thrones" tours pass.

What will I remember? Watching the sunset over Andalusia from an abandoned monastery, sharing a meal with some migrant workers on an olive orchard in Tuscany, giving Goran and his hobbled sheep a ride and subsequently living with him for a week on his lavender farm in Croatia. None of that would have been open to me without a car. But, I guess that is just the American in me talking.

Oh, I'm Croatian, having lived in Canada for a quarter of a century, and fully agree. I've rented a car last few times in Croatia. My wife is Canadian and our favourite time was when we got sick of phenomenally over-crowded tourist destinations, turned off gps, and followed smaller and smaller roads we were convinced were taking us in right direction, until a dirt path petered out in somebody's vineyard :)

> Probably 15 times, people lectured me under the guise of a question "Why did you rent a car? Why not just take trains?", and maybe 10 times "That's so American".

As a European (Italian) myself I find that odd, as for all but trips that are either to a single city, or very specific limited area with superb train/public transport access, I'll definitively use a car, as do most people I know.

But that may also come from the fact that I did not grew up in a big(ger) city, and while I took the bus and train for going into school, a car was still quite the requirement for a lot of other things anyway.

Definitively agree, when I went camping with a few friends in tents around Sweden in 2017 we met some wondeful people in quite remote areas, and it just wouldn't work with trains or the like, that was only OK when staying in Göteborg for a few days.

Same in Madeira, we rented a car there and without that we'd have been confined to basically the main city Funchal only, but with the car we could explore the whole island nicely, basically spending a day or two in each corner.

> You know what I'm not going to remember? Standing in a mob waiting for a train in Cinque Terre.

Well, it seems it left an impression ;-P

That said, I went to Cinque Terre in 2020 by car, parked in Monterosso and was fine using the train between the five towns, but then most US/UK tourists did not visit that year, so it may have been quite a different experience. I really do not think that traveling between the towns using a car would be better than the train, as Monterosso is the single one that is _somewhat_ car accessible, at least for smaller ones.

> Standing in a mob waiting for a train in Cinque Terre

Same here! I just did a road trip from UK to Italy, and standing on the platform at Vernazza was by far the worst part of the whole trip.

as someone who crossed half of europe by bike and train myself, i would absolutely love that!

where can i check for updates?

> Same stuff, but you can only take public transport or a bicycle.

hahahah this got a laugh out of me. Really fun app you have here. What inspired you?

Back when I worked at Samara (Aribnb's R&D) we needed to generate a dataset with more or less realistic road trip routes. With stops on the way and realistic destinations. Working on that and then exploring the results was fun and made me realise I could build it for everyone's fun too. That's from technical side, but also my wonderful 5 years in the United States and all the trips we had inspired me from sentimental side too.

That's so cool. I sure appreciate you for making this for us and it's cool that your job at the time had creative stuff like this to do. This hits that same spot that ProgressQuest or Blaseball hits.

> you can only take public transport or a bicycle.

Haha, perfect!

In the US, they usually call it "CB Radio" (Citzen's Band) not "walkie talkie" (unless the radio is hand operated and not mounted to the dashboard).

The frequencies displayed are UHF, in the European PMR446 band, which is nearly identical to American FRS but not close enough to use the same radios. Call that a minor miss on the author's part, change those 446's to 462's and label it FRS, it'd be good.

Exact numbers notwithstanding, it's UHF so the wavelength (roughly 70cm) is small enough to penetrate the window-sized openings in the car's metal shell, unlike the larger wavelengths of CB (27MHz, 11 meter wavelength) which require an external antenna.

I've used both FRS and amateur 70cm (440MHz) on roadtrips, and it's much more convenient than CB owing to precisely that -- simple whip antennas on handheld radios, no magnet-mount mess with a coax cable pinched in a door seal somewhere.

The audio is also somewhat unrealistic in that if multiple users are pressing push-to-talk simultaneously, their voices mix together. Realistically only the strongest one would get through, owing to the "FM capture effect", and the others you'd never know were there until they keyed up at a non-conflicting moment.

Where I lived in rural Nebraska, polka radio stations were more common than country radio stations. This reflected the ethnicity and immigration history of the region I lived in.

Blew my mind when I moved there, and still does. This was a long time ago, I would be surprised if there is still so much polka radio.

not for country music, but other country's music: https://radiooooo.com/