Ed Wallace:

Not long ago CNN/Money online featured a story detailing Six Great American Road Trips. The first was a 900-mile journey from Grand Forks, N. Dakota, to Kalispell, Montana, on U.S. Route 2. Others included the Blue Ridge Parkway through the Great Smoky Mountains, the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, and, of course, the Pacific Coast Highway from LA to San Francisco.
 
 Even so, although AAA issues press releases pre-holiday predictions about how many Americans will take to the roads, most everyone I’ve known prefers simply to jump on a flight to wherever they’re going and leave the driving to someone else. That’s too bad, because you don’t get the impact of the landscape, or meet your fellow Americans, from 35,000 feet.