Turning Back Time

Josh and Seth Meyers in a family vacation photo with parents Hilary and Larry. Courtesy Seth Meyers

Few Granite State celebrities command the charm of Seth Meyers. And lately, the “Late Night” host seems to have found a new platform — perhaps to fill the creative void left by the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike — with the podcast, “Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers.”

Seth and his actor-comedian younger brother, Josh, reminisce about childhood vacations and other miscellaneous memories from their adolescence, with the help of some familiar voices.

In the debut episode, the brothers swap stories with Seth’s fellow “Saturday Night Live” alumnus and New Englander Amy Poehler about the local brand of “love language” that is affectionate familial taunting — and the perils of taking family trips with teens.

“Yes, I saw some cool stuff, but I was very moody,” Poehler recalled of one such excursion to Puerto Rico. “And at the time, I just remember being like, it’s so hot. And like, there’s frogs everywhere and the food is so weird.”

In the second episode, local audiences will likely get a kick out of the story about Josh’s attempt to skirt his shift bussing tables at Shorty’s Mexican Roadhouse to watch the Manchester High School West basketball team in the state finals. (Spoiler alert: He made the game, but lost the job.)

But the really endearing bits, for those here in New Hampshire, come in the third episode, where Seth and Josh are joined by their parents and longtime Bedford residents, Larry and Hillary. They laugh their way through a highlight reel of family vacations from Pittsburgh to Telluride, with plenty of detours through New England. 

“Most of the time after we moved to New Hampshire, we didn’t go out West very often because we could ski here,” Larry recalled, recounting trips to Waterville Valley.

Vacationland, unsurprisingly, also plays prominently. The family recalled a particularly harrowing excursion to Maine’s Molasses Pond, which Hillary says she learned about in the Bedford Bulletin, that included a traumatic bug bite incident and an outhouse. A trip to Chebeague Island led the family to fantasize about opening up their own hotel, the “All Inn.”

Whether you can relate to their memories of singing along to cassettes on road trips winding through the Kancamagus Highway — which, they say, they always called the ‘Kan-cah-may-gus’ Highway” — surely you might find some comfort in the refrain the brothers offer their parents at the end of the episode: “We encounter calamity, but it made us stronger as a family.”