One for the road.

Back-road adventurer on America's 'Blue Highways'

I like this part:

CNN: What do you think it is that draws us to the road?

Heat-Moon: Everybody in this nation, in the Americas, we all are descendants of people who came from the other hemisphere, each of us a descendant of travelers. Movement is in our blood. To speak metaphorically, we seem to carry a travel gene that makes us want to move. And a lot of us also carry an active curiosity gene. We're bears that go over the mountain to see what we can see.

The second aspect to your question is that we inhabit a large land topographically hospitable to long-distance travel.

The great middle of America is generally open terrain that, by comparison with many other countries, lends itself to human movement.

Our rivers often run in fortuitous directions for our shufflings, and our mountains tend toward the edges.

The horizons of America are often quite distant, and horizons are visual invitations to the curious, the restless, the unsatisfied.