An Adventure Along America's Unseen Corners.

There is something magical about driving off into the great unknown down an open highway. Perhaps it is the promise of freedom, the excitement of the discovery, or the simple pleasure of getting somewhere else. Whatever it is, it beckons to us, most urgently when life has been too compartmentalized, too fragmented.

Note: No title length parameters were provided. And I did call and hang up—not in the great cities and the spas where all the tourists go, but at America's less formal, off-the-highway rest stops, where the country comes close and merciless.

I left behind a Northern California fog. I had no idea where I was going, but a full tank of gas, music, and a dog-eared copy of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. I was going to Mendocino, a cliff town that's isolated from the others who can't find it. There is a silent understanding in Mendocino—it has the salt smell of the sea, the ice-cold beat of the waves, and the creaking weathered wooden houses with secrets.

Then I rode into the redwoods inside. Riding among those towering trees was like riding through the entrance of a cathedral of nature. Time stands still under such a canopy. I hung along the rim of the Avenue of the Giants and awakened to bird song and silence that only the woods provide.

And then I was in southern Utah, a different planet. Someone had spoken and spoken and spoken about Zion and Bryce Canyon, and zip. The color, the silence, the size.puts you in your place. I did Angel's Landing early one morning, blue and orange sky, and for a few minutes, I had the sense of being the only human on the planet.

I met others along the way who completed their own pages in my book: a retired schoolteacher now whittling in New Mexico, a couple taking a cross-country journey in a retired school bus, a Navajo guide who taught me about his people under the starry night of Monument Valley. They were not friends by chance—a testament that America is not just big in physical space, but in heart as well.

And Wisconsin's Driftless Area. The most unlikely of them all, maybe. An area where glaciers cut straight through, creating bluffs of breathtaking beauty, winding streams, and charming villages frozen in time. I spent the night in a snug family bed-and-breakfast in Viroqua, ate farm-to-table dinners, and canoe-ed along the Kickapoo River with eagles as my only companions and the river's soothing hum.

Along the way, I lost my addiction to clocks. I lost my ritual of checking in via email. I lost my worry about posting every minute on social media. Travel, real travel, pulls you out of performative and into the present.

When I finally arrived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, waves from the Atlantic washing over my toes, I knew this country is not sustained by interstate highways, but by stories. And each and every small town, each and every diner, each and every rest stop on the journey puts another line in the poem.

If you're lost, burned out, or simply wondering what's over the horizon, go. Not everything requires a plan. Some of the most amazing things that have ever occurred to me were because I took the back road, the wrong street, or simply asked the townsman where to have breakfast.

Wandering is not losing one's way. Occasionally, it's the journey that teaches you what's most precious.