In 1977, the German band Kraftwerk released Trans Europ Express, an album that had a monumental affect on the course of music and conjured the beginnings of a new forward looking identity for Europe. The album embodied the idea of travel as a unifying force in a post-WWII world full of divisions—most notably, in Germany itself. 

Kraftwerk’s train reference hinted at a newly forming European identity—a multi-nation community—and the album itself was a reflexion and product of this growing interconnectedness. Building off of these ideas, we discuss how travel can physically connect places, and how it can also create a psychological bond between peoples.

In March of 2016, the Obama family went on a whirlwind 3-day tour of Havana, Cuba—the first visit to the island by a sitting U.S. president since 1928. The occasion was the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and for Obama, the trip was a careful balance of politics and pleasure. In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of how the trip came to be after a century's worth of contentious history between the two countries, and how things have fared since. 

Kaleena and Brian delve into the world of the Beatles around the mid 1960s and the events surrounding the trip to India that George Harrison and his wife Patti Boyd took in 1966. We look at the travel trends that led to Harrison’s fateful trip and the subsequent travels of the entire Beatles gang to India following George’s trip, and  examine the travel trend that emerged in the post-WWII, post-colonial world of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and ushered in a novel form of travel as a way to explore and discover meaning in life, as popularized by the Beat Poets and (especially) the Beatles, as well as new ideas around crowdsourcing travel knowledge.

Hurricane Iniki made landfall on the island of Kauai as a Category 4 storm on September 11, 1992—the strongest storm ever to hit the island. In Hawaiian, Iniki means “a strong piercing wind” and it left a wake of destruction that had lasting effects on Hawaii’s people and its tourist-centered economy. 

In this episode, Kaleena and Brian discuss the impact it had and the renewed questions around Kauai’s dependency on tourism and sustainability to try to understand how an event like this can affect thinking around a community’s reliance on tourism versus other more stable industries.