Quick Take
- Narration: David Colacci brings the warmth and timing that Matt Smith’s epistolary format requires, making the couple’s banter between emails feel natural rather than performed.
- Themes: Marriage as ongoing adventure, the American national park system as both landscape and character, the comedy of middle age encountering genuine wilderness
- Mood: Cheerful and expansive, occasionally unexpectedly moving when the landscape earns it
- Verdict: Season 2 delivers on the first book’s promise and earns its place as the kind of travel memoir you listen to while planning your own next trip.
I listened to about an hour of Dear Bob and Sue Season 2 on a drive through countryside that was objectively less dramatic than anything Matt and Karen were hiking, and found myself significantly more motivated to reroute than my schedule permitted. That may be the most accurate description of what this series does: it makes you want to go somewhere. Not necessarily the specific trails Matt and Karen describe, though some of those are genuinely compelling, but somewhere with good boots and a willingness to be surprised by what you find. That motivating quality is the series’ most consistent and underappreciated achievement.
Season 2 follows the same format as the first book: a series of emails from Matt to their friends Bob and Sue, recounting the couple’s adventures hiking through lesser-known parks, national monuments, and revisiting some favorites across the Western United States. Matt Smith is a former tech executive who writes with the particular self-deprecating clarity of someone who has spent a career presenting complicated information and knows how to tell a story efficiently without making it feel processed. His wife Karen is his partner in both hiking and humor, and their dynamic drives the book as much as the landscape does. David Colacci’s narration catches the warmth of their collaboration without overselling it.
The Email Format and Why It Works in Audio
The epistolary structure of the Dear Bob and Sue series is one of those formal choices that looks casual but is actually doing significant structural work. Each email functions as a unit with its own beginning, middle, and end, which makes the book easy to listen to in sections without losing thread. Colacci’s narration benefits from this: he can lean into the tone of each email as a discrete performance rather than needing to sustain a single unbroken register across nearly twelve hours. The lighter emails play lightly; the more affecting ones receive the space they need.
The humor in these emails is domestic rather than self-consciously witty, which is what makes it durable across a long listen. Matt and Karen’s jokes are the kind that couples develop over years of shared experience, where the comedy is in the recognition rather than the construction. Multiple reviewers have described the banter as something they return to as a reference point for their own trips, and one listener mentioned reading the book aloud to their husband on a road trip and finding that phrases from it entered their personal travel vocabulary permanently after that. That is the signature of writing that has made it into someone’s life rather than merely passed through their attention.
The Western Parks and the Value of the Overlooked Place
Season 2 focuses on the Western US, covering public lands that tend to receive less attention than the marquee national parks that anchor most visitor itineraries. This is one of the book’s genuine contributions: Matt and Karen’s low-key enthusiasm for the hidden gems and lesser-known national monuments functions as practical advocacy as much as personal memoir. Several reviewers noted using the book as an actual reference for planning trips, which is a useful function for any travel writing to fulfill beyond its entertainment value.
The writing about the trails themselves is not technical. You will not finish this book knowing how to navigate challenging terrain or understanding wilderness safety at a granular level. What you will understand is what it felt like to stand in specific places, what was worth the effort and what was not, and why two fairly ordinary people keep doing this rather than staying home. That texture of real experience over curated spectacle is what distinguishes travel memoir from travel marketing, and Smith consistently lands on the right side of that line throughout twelve hours.
Season 2 as Second Chapter
Season 2 is better approached as a continuation than as a standalone entry. The friendship between Matt and the friends he is writing to, the dynamic between him and Karen, and several running references are established in the first book and deepened here. Listeners who start with Season 2 can follow the narrative without significant confusion, but the emotional payoffs of certain moments depend on having the prior context to understand what they mean in the larger story of this couple’s relationship to the land they keep returning to.
One reviewer described finishing Season 2 in tears because they did not want it to end, which is not a response you get from travel writing that stays at the surface. The reviewer who compared the series favorably to Bill Bryson’s writing is making an apt tonal comparison: Bryson and Smith share a gift for finding the comic and the quietly moving in close proximity to each other, and for placing the reader inside an experience without making them feel like a tourist in someone else’s life. The comparison is not hyperbolic.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Dear Bob and Sue Season 2 is for listeners who enjoy travel memoir that is warm, funny, and built on real experience rather than idealized or manufactured adventure. It is an excellent listen for road trips, for anyone planning Western park visits, or for people who want something light without being shallow or forgettable. Those expecting technical hiking guidance, dramatic survival stories, or literary ambition in the tradition of nature writing will find the register too casual for their purposes. For the audience it is written for, it is a reliably satisfying way to spend nearly twelve hours, with the added benefit of making you genuinely want to plan your next adventure before the final email is read.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to listen to the first Dear Bob and Sue book before Season 2?
Not strictly necessary, but the humor, character dynamics, and some running references are established in Season 1. Starting with the first book will make Season 2 more rewarding, though new listeners can follow the narrative independently.
How practical is this book as an actual resource for planning national park trips?
Multiple listeners have used it as a reference. It is not a guidebook or a technical hiking resource, but it provides genuine impressions of specific parks, trails, and experiences that help calibrate expectations before visiting.
Does David Colacci narrate the entire Dear Bob and Sue series, or did the narrator change between seasons?
Colacci narrates Season 2, and his delivery suits the book’s warm, epistolary format well. Whether he narrated the first book as well should be verified if consistency across the series matters to you.
Is this book primarily comedy, or does the landscape writing have genuine depth?
Both are present. The humor is central to the book’s voice, but Smith writes about specific places with real affection and observation. The comedy and the landscape writing support each other rather than one undercutting the other.
