Charles Kuralt, the journalist who crisscrossed the back roads of America and chronicled his travels in “On the Road” for CBS, perhaps summed up road travel more succinctly than anyone when he intoned, “Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.”
Every year my husband and I drive thousands of miles, sometimes as much for the adventure of traveling as a means of simply getting from one place to another. And unless time is critically important, we avoid interstate highways altogether in favor of rambling along the back roads, always searching for something wonderful and interesting, even if it takes twice as long to get to where we’re going.
During our sojourns, we’ve stumbled upon some pretty remarkable and unexpected sights: a lone giraffe grazing in a field out in the middle of nowhere in South Carolina, a rattlesnake so monstrous that its stretched-out length took up an entire half of a country road, and an uncountable number of Statue of Liberty replicas. We also learned that nearly every single town in the southeastern United States, no matter the population from a thousand to a million, has either a Dollar General or a Dairy Queen, that we often see vehicles hundreds of miles away from our hometown with the same county license plates as ours and, finally, no matter how beautiful or fun the destination, the best view is turning into the driveway and seeing our home after being gone for a long time.
