For a lot of us, summer means road trips, which also means you're probably looking for good

things to listen to in the car. One of Out There's sponsors is a podcast called Out Travel the

System. Out Travel the System is brought to you by Expedia, and its mission is to inspire and inform about travel.

That can mean anything from building your bucket list to taking concrete steps to take that next trip when the time is right.

The podcast finds people who are passionate about travel, including a commercial airline pilot, a woman who travels

pretty much year-round, and a man who wants to have visited every country in the world by the

end of this year. When it comes to inspiration, out-travel the system is also giving a voice to

people who love their hometowns and want to share

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Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

On today's episode, we talk with the author of a book called Horse Crazy.

Horse Crazy is part memoir and part cultural exploration.

It's a love letter to an animal.

It's a story about the struggle to belong.

And it's a deep dive into the fascinating things that horses and the humans connected to them can teach us about ourselves and our society.

I'm joined now by horse crazy author Sarah Maslin Nier.

So how did the idea for this book come about?

I have always been a secret, obsessive horse person, emphasis on secret, because as a reporter for the New York Times, I cover really hard corners of the earth, really difficult subjects,

some of the grittiest, and I was really concerned that if I ever outed myself

as a horse person, that if people knew that so much of my heart and mind was filled with ponies,

I wouldn't be taken seriously doing my job. And I was chatting with a friend about wanting to write a book,

...