Skip to main content

HearHere’s App Uses Actors To Narrate the American Landscape

Between adventure and local culture, road trips require patience through monotonous hours in a confined space. No need to suffer, though, because there’s always an app for that.

Make the plains, hills, mountains, and rivers come alive with HearHere, an immersive storytelling app. Paint the landscape with colorful characters, scenes, and natural wonders. Listen to music, local insights, and sports. Spark journeys with short stories narrated by Kevin Costner, John Lithgow, and more. HearHere casts tales to your taste with content tailored to user thematic interests.

A man drives a car through a hilly landscape while listening to the HearHere app.
HearHere.

From A Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip to America’s Easternmost Point in Lubec, Maine, HearHere is home to more than 10,000 stories describing the mythos painting this great, colorful swathe we call the United States.

Along the way you’ll recognize famous voices like Costner talking about the Pacific Coast, Lithgow unveiling personal recollections of towns that he’s lived or visited, and professional storytellers like James Fester regaling road trippers with Minnesota’s Mysterious Magnetic Rock, a 42-foot spire alien to its surroundings.

In the Southwest, roll along with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Arizona. Awe at the Havasupai tribe’s clinging to life atop the sere Grand Canyon’s sheer walls. Or hear about the eerie, bare Arizona strip where, in the barren northeastern corner of the state, where there are fewer than 10,000 people spread across 7,878.11 square miles, an area larger than several U.S. states.

Despite its sheer size, the app is relatively easy to navigate and find your way through. There’s a locator that tracks down episodes near your location. To surf around, zoom in and out on a U.S. map. Zoom all the way out and there’s even a few scattered additions in Alaska and one in Hawaii.

HearHere’s blog is also helpful and engaging, offering behind-the-scenes action, features with contributing authors, and road trip guides. Driving from east to west in the southern U.S., learn about Tampa’s Miracle at Cockroach Bay, pass by the spot where Louisiana’s first rebel officer was killed in New Orleans, and then get the inside scoop on the live music capital of the U.S. as you pull into Austin.

HearHere App displays on mobile phones.
HearHere.

Crossing the continent to the north, there’s not always a ton to see surfing up and down South Dakota’s green, hilled waves across much of the state, but with HearHere, learn about its famous people memorialized at the South Dakota Hall of Fame or engage with its Native residents, the Lakota, as they made a last stand in 1852 across the eastern side of the state to its sacred Black Hills, stolen from them for mineral rights.

Annual unlimited subscriptions run for $35.99. Just download the Android or iOS app.

Learn More

Editors' Recommendations

Matthew Denis
Matt Denis is an on-the-go remote multimedia reporter, exploring arts, culture, and the existential in the Pacific Northwest…
Save Yourself Data Overages when Traveling with the Three Best Offline Map Apps
Google Maps App

Travel is amazing. Getting hit with exorbitant data roaming fees isn’t. Unfortunately, it can be damn near impossible to make sense of your mobile carrier’s international plans and pricing. What’s worse is that accessing map apps (arguably the most essential bit of technology for travelers) requires boatloads of data. But, with a little advanced planning, it doesn’t have to. These three offline map apps allow for map viewing without a data binge, so you’re (almost) guaranteed never to get lost while in a foreign country.
Google Maps

Second only to Waze, Google Maps is the silver standard for mobile mapping applications. One of its best and still relatively unknown features is the ability to access maps offline. It’s a godsend for travelers, but the functionality is buried in the app if you don’t know where to look. You can access it like so:

Read more
The Best North American Hotels for Outdoor-Lovers
2-Taylor-River-Lodge-(near-Crested-Butte,-Colorado)-

Location, location, location — for home buyers and travelers, this is what it all boils down to. For outdoor lovers, finding the right hotel to serve as a base of operations for an entire vacation’s worth of adventures is critical. To help you decide, here are four of our favorite adventure-centric hotels in North America.
Bugaboos Lodge (British Columbia)
For fifty years, Bugaboos Lodge has offered some of Canada’s best heli-skiing opportunities. Guests skip the traditional lift lines (because there are no lifts here) and instead ascend the jagged Purcell Mountains via helicopter. On any given day, it’s easy to carve a line down the mountain without seeing another soul. For guests who appreciate more relaxed pursuits, the hotel also offers plenty of modern, luxurious amenities that don’t involve waist-deep powder. There’s an on-site four-story climbing wall, a steam room, a dry sauna, more than 12 miles of cross-country trails, and a rooftop hot tub with one of the most stunning mountain views on the continent.

CMH Bugaboos Virtual Tour

Read more
Report: This is how much you should expect airfare to cost for your summer travel
You may want to travel domestically this summer
airplane in blue sky

Thinking about booking a weekend getaway or a week's long, unplugged, get-me-out-of-here-right-this-minute trip, the first thing on your mind is probably, "How much is this going to set me back?" It can often be a deal breaker on how long you can go, where you are traveling, and if you can afford to go at all.

While the airlines have certainly changed their flight prices post-COVID, the cost of airfare for this summer may surprise you. Travel booking site Hopper came out with a report that breaks down how much flyers can expect to pay based on location, and it also includes some good intel on hotels and car rentals as well. The bottom line: It's going to cost you to unwind. Cheap airfare will be hard to come by.
How much will a trip cost this summer?
According to their report, average round-trip air ticket prices to Europe increased over last year to the tune of $1,167 versus $850 last year. If Asia is on your bucket list, the news is equally dismal. The average round-trip ticket is coming in at $1,817, compared to only $917 during the summer of 2020. Even going to Canada will cost you more, 2% higher than last year and up 11% over 2019.

Read more