Q. Did you travel much in your childhood?

A. My family took trips for two reasons only: to attend Sanctified Brethren Bible conferences for several days of preaching and Bible study or to visit relatives who we actually liked, so my memories of travel are tied up with the Book of Deuteronomy and the imminence of the second coming, or feeding Aunt Bessie’s chickens.

We rode in a Ford station wagon, my mother with a breadboard on her lap making baloney sandwiches to save money, my dad at the wheel, and I with my face to the window inhaling the scenery. The West was a mythical land to an American boy back then, and as you rode through Montana, you could visualize Roy and Gene and John Wayne galloping along in defense of women and children and civilization.

Now, as an adult, I mostly travel on business, meaning that I’m treated like a 10-year-old child: I fly, someone meets the plane, I’m taken to a hotel, people wait on me. As a child, you suffered boredom, which made you a keen observer of your surroundings, and then something fabulous happens — your cousin asks if you want to drive the tractor and there you are, 11 years old, shifting an Allis-Chalmers into gear and bouncing up a dirt road in the mountains over the St. Joe river. The memory of the smell of exhaust and pines and wet forest floor is permanent. There is nothing memorable about airports. Nothing whatever.

Q. Have you ever felt carried away by a particular place in America?

A. Well, the Grand Canyon, of course, and the coastline of Maine and a slow Sunday morning drive from Memphis to Nashville through little towns of old white houses with big gardens burgeoning with jasmine and honeysuckle. And then there is North Dakota, which is sheer grandeur, but you have to get off the freeway and get out of the car and walk. If you hike 10 miles at night on the High Plains of North Dakota, it could change your life. And for the good.

Q. You once wrote, “Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed… ” Is this your ideal way to travel?

A. It is. I like to sit in coffee shops and pass for a native and so I’ve missed out on the Louvre, the Acropolis, the Roman catacombs, the Lincoln Memorial, because I didn’t want to be taken for a tourist. I love London as a walking city. You set out lumbering down medieval streets, wander impulsively and let yourself get lost and stop for lunch and wander further. When you’re tired of being lost, you hail a cab. That’s a day well spent.

Q. Have you noticed any changes to the character of the regions you travel?

A. I don’t hear accents as I used to, either Southern or Western or New England or New York. My friend Ira of Brooklyn is a rare speaker of that delicious tongue. Maybe comedy and caricature killed them off. The Minnesota accent is now “done” by children as a joke, the accent that all my aunts and uncles favored. This is an impoverishment that makes me a little wistful. But of course I fixed my own accent back when I got into radio, so I should talk.

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Daniel Peebles for The New York Times

For our annual U.S. issue, our theme is the open road. We asked a selection of national correspondents for their favorite routes, Guy Trebay discussed the joys of driving, and the Frugal Traveler shared his budget-friendly journey in the South. Now we want to hear about your favorite road trips. Share your favorite trips in the comments section below, or on Twitter, using the hashtag #faveroadtrip; we’ll collect our favorite tweets and post them on this blog.

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JON CARAMANICA “We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2,” the 2005 mixtape from the hip-hop duo Clipse, is all forward motion, dark, anxiety-inducing verses atop surging, snarling beats. It makes you feel as if you’re on the run — as good a reason to be in the car as any.

NATE CHINEN Locomotion was always a guiding principle for the jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery, who had the Cadillac of rhythm sections on the 1965 club date that became “Smokin’ at the Half Note” by the Wynton Kelly Trio and Montgomery. The entire album grooves like crazy, but especially the back-to-back tracks “Unit 7” and “Four on Six” — some of the best highway music ever made.

JON PARELES My Morning Jacket’s “Okonokos” is a double live album — good for a long ride — of ringing, optimistic, expansive songs, propulsive but never rushed and ready to soundtrack a wide-open road. And should the scenery get dull, there’s an opportunity to puzzle out Jim James’s lyrics.

BEN RATLIFF For longer drives I want music that sounds like one elevated, joyous, trancelike discourse. Often that’s gospel, from whenever. Right now I like Jason Nelson’s new album, “Shifting the Atmosphere,” and the 1948 Alan Lomax recordings of Mississippi and Texas church music at culturalequity.org.

BEN SISARIO The Shins, “Oh, Inverted World.” For most people the campfire acoustic guitar and moody vocals of the song “New Slang” will probably conjure up the love story of the film “Garden State.” But I will always associate its slightly spooky atmospherics with an overnight drive through the Southwest, where the sky looks like outer space and a human voice feels like one of your only ties to Earth.

ANTHONY TOMMASINI For road trips, no companion helps pass the time better than Wagner, whose operas unfold over long, organic spans, with fitful bursts and ruminative stretches. The four-hour drive from Manhattan to Cooperstown, N.Y., for the Glimmerglass Opera Festival zips right by when I’m listening to any of the “Ring” operas, say Georg Solti’s recording of “Götterdämmerung.” Or Karl Böhm’s classic recording of “Tristan und Isolde” with Birgit Nilsson. That does the job.

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California
Route 1

The Pacific Coast Highway, which runs along much of the California coast, is probably one of the most iconic stretches of road in the country, memorialized in film, sought out by tourists. My favorite stretch is in Malibu, 25 miles or so of highway that will reward you with a sunny blur of California coast: beaches, mountains, ocean, wetlands and surfers.

Driving north out of Santa Monica on Route 1 (or the P.C.H. as it known here), the highway’s charms are hidden at first. You will pass “Millionaire’s Row,” home to the likes of David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose deceptively modest houses are hidden by shrubs. Traffic should ease once you pass Malibu Lagoon State Beach. But don’t pass it. Stop and walk the boardwalks that crisscross the lagoon, then head out to the beach to watch surfers tackle what many view as the best waves in the United States.

From here, the coastline reveals itself at every turn and over every hill: sparkling surf on your left, green hills and red cliffs on your right. Pay the fee and park at Point Dume State Beach, which, with its soaring cliffs and dolphins and sea lions splashing in the water, is hard to beat on a clear morning. (But beatable it is: go at sunset). Dawn or dusk, take the well-marked trail at the end of the parking lot to the top of the cliff.

El Matador Beach, up the road, is an otherworldly, secluded patch of rock formations, pools and sandy coves. Be forewarned, though, that you have to walk down a lot of steps to reach it. For a dramatic return, take Route 23 through the Santa Monica Mountains back to Los Angeles — a curvy, ear-popping, heart-stopping 14 miles or so. It spills out onto Highway 101, a return to what is probably what you think of when you think of Los Angeles. But after this drive you will never think of the city that way again.
— ADAM NAGOURNEY

Colorado
Highway 285

In the best rock songs, which are also by no coincidence the best driving songs, there’s a moment when all the gears come into play — a pause just before the chorus when everything in the universe seems, for the briefest of moments, to expand and your scalp tingles and lifts a millimeter toward infinity.

U.S. Highway 285 in Colorado hits that perfect note at Kenosha Pass, when after roughly 65 miles of circuitous if not tedious two-lane mountain driving heading southwest from Denver, you come around a bend and, without warning, roar down into the high, vast expanse of the South Park Valley.

For emotional and psychological wallop, there is nothing like South Park: 900 square miles of mostly treeless alpine beauty — 9,000 feet in elevation or better on the valley floor, ringed by mountains higher still that hold their snowpack like a grudge. The poet Walt Whitman stopped at Kenosha on a trip west in 1879.

“The whole Western World is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains,” he wrote in his journal during a stop overlooking the valley.

Decades before the first windmilled power chord, Whitman’s words sent scalps tingling in expanded consciousness.
— KIRK JOHNSON

Georgia
Highway 441

Finding the old South in the South isn’t always easy, which is what makes a little stretch of Highway 441 east of Atlanta so sweet.

The trip starts in Athens, a college town not far from Atlanta whence sprang both R.E.M. and a fanatic creature known as the University of Georgia Bulldog fan.

In minutes you’re in the country, fruit stands popping up at reliable intervals. Boiled peanuts, peaches and mayhaw jelly comprise the holy trinity. The latter tastes like a cross between apples and strawberries, and is coaxed from red berries that grow in the swamps in the spring.

Your essential pit stop is Reed’s Odds Ends, where the bathrooms are clean and the Cokes are cold. It’s like a big country garage sale and church fund-raiser all mixed together. Load the car with quilts, vintage dinnerware, hubcaps and, perhaps, a ceramic dog.

The drive ends in Madison, one of the few places near Atlanta that wasn’t burned during the Civil War. The town is small, but has about 100 restored antebellum homes.

After you look at how the kings and queens of cotton lived, drive just across the tracks to Adrian’s Place, a classic Southern meat-and-three, where a plate of fried chicken with yellow squash, collards and some peach cobbler will let you know you are, indeed, in the South.
— KIM SEVERSON

New York
Route 28

Carved out of the wild heart of upstate New York, Route 28 is shaped like a kindergartner’s C — wiggly, squiggly and questionably curved — looping north to south, from the Adirondacks all the way down to the Catskills. Quick it ain’t: a two-hour highway drive from Warrensburg to Kingston can take three times that long on Route 28.

But its pleasures are worth it. In the north, Route 28 meanders near lakes like George past ski joints like Gore. Its Adirondack portion crosses the churning headwaters of the Hudson River. Farther south, it passes by splotches of fresh water, tiny towns with names that tell you who lived there before (Indian Lake) and why (Old Forge), and skirts classic-sounding outposts like Utica and Rome. Then it drops down to Cooperstown, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, where legends like Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and George Herman Ruth, aka The Babe, have their plaques hung for all posterity.

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But this is to be expected when you’re driving a small studio apartment, or, as I began to call it, my “rig.” One man in a rural California border town even called it cute. He said it reminded him of a Doritos delivery truck.

The rig was a 19-foot-long, gleaming white, class-C motor home — an RV that I rented from Cruise America, the country’s largest recreational vehicle rental company; 800-RV-4RENT was prominently emblazoned across the exterior, as were colorful images of America’s national parks and natural patrimony.

It was a proverbial flag patch sewn on a backpack, and as someone who makes an effort to downplay the fact that I’m a tourist when I travel, this granted no disguise. And just as well: I had never driven an RV before, and for this I could say I had never experienced my own country as millions do every summer, and have for more than a century.

When I booked the RV online a couple of months earlier, I found myself signing up for not so much a mode of transportation as a set of desirable feelings. “With a Cruise America RV,” the Web site said, “you can roam wherever your spirit takes you, throughout the US and Canada. And with a full kitchen in your RV, you can skip out on endless drive-through menus and enjoy more satisfying meals and snacks.” Roam, spirit, satisfying meals: these are not the sort of words used to tout a rental car or an airplane seat. An RV road trip promised the distinction of freedom and flexibility, comfort and convenience: a travel experience unencumbered by the need for reservations.

I enlisted my friends Tyson and Angelina, and we mapped a vague plan: Oakland, Calif., to Oregon and back, in eight days. We’d go where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go. We’d tour less-visited national parks and rural towns and sleep wherever it suited us.

RVers constitute a certain tribe on the road, and I learned that thousands were converging in central Oregon for what was billed as the Greatest RV Rally in the World. On a July afternoon, after receiving instructions in the Cruise America parking lot on how to check the RV’s water levels and empty the waste tank, we headed off on Interstate 80.

Packing for an RV road trip is like preparing for a weekend at a cozy cabin. The luxury of space and the semblance of domestic life inspired me to carry things like candles and paprika, soft cotton sheets and extra pillows. I took sharp knives, folding chairs and musical instruments and put avocados and lemons in a bowl on the kitchenette counter. We hung up our coats in the closet, with hangers. As I drove the rig, Tyson and Angelina put away groceries.

A compact RV drives like a van, but its bulky size soon altered my personality behind the wheel. I paid close attention to the yellow speed advisory signs for a change, and I rarely switched lanes, feeling unusually content to cruise in a patient, linear fashion. (Abrupt turns would cause the drawers and cabinets to fly open, anyway, prompting a scramble for rolling onions.) From a higher perch the landscape appeared wider, more available. Once we joined Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley I began to feel a closer kinship with the truckers on the road, especially that first evening, after we pulled into a Walmart.

OF all the things Walmart is best known for (low prices, litigation, the demise of mom-and-pop stores), an overnight stopping place for RVers is not among them. But drive any evening into a Walmart lot along a busy highway, and you’ll probably find parked motor homes.

RVers often spend weeks on the road: that road is long, and there are many Walmarts along the way. As the company sees it, RVs arrive with their own bathrooms, and their drivers are well positioned to shop: everybody’s happy. Searching online from my phone I learned there were three Walmarts staggered along 30 miles of Interstate 5 in Northern California.

ANDY ISAACSON contributes to The Times as a writer and photographer. His most recent cover article for Travel was on shamanism and culture in the Ecuadorean Amazon.

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Morning Walkabout

A daily capsule of travel news curated by our writers and editors.

Flight Delay=Free Concert An Air Canada flight bound for Romania was delayed. Luckily, some of the passengers happened to be members of Lemon Bucket Orkestra, who describe themselves as a “Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Punk-Super-Party-Band.” The 20-minute delay soon became an impromptu concert. (Consumerist)

More Delays for Berlin After being pushed back by a couple of months, the opening of the new $3.18 billion Willy Brandt Airport in Berlin has been further delayed, probably until 2013. (MSNBC)

Medellín’s Second Act Medellín, Colombia, has been reborn as a city with a budding tourist industry, with new public buildings and squares as well as an efficient metro and cable car system. (The New York Times)

A Museum Reborn The new Barnes Museum in Philadelphia opens on Saturday, with galleries that are a replica of the old but that bathe the works in light that makes it seem as if they’ve been cleaned.  (The New York Times)

10 Trips for Summer Destinations in Bolivia, Scotland and Michigan are among the choices in this list. (National Geographic)

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