Aroll Gellner in the San Francisco Chronicle explains why Route 66 aficionados eschew the interstates when possible and sticks to the old two-lane roads.

Charles Kuralt, the longtime “On the Road” correspondent for CBS News, once observed that “thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” Since Kuralt made that comment a generation ago, things have only gotten worse. Nowadays, instead of not seeing anything, we just see the same things over and over, no matter where we go.

Although the interstate system crisscrosses some of the most splendidly varied landscape on the earth, it has also helped make traveling that landscape an experience of unparalleled monotony. It matters little whether you’re on the left coast or the right, on the Canadian border or in the Deep South: As long as you stay near the freeway, you could be anywhere or nowhere. …

The pity is, you wouldn’t know what was lost unless you had seen what came before. Motor down what’s left of Highway 97 in Northern California, or Highway 1 along the New England coast, or the legendary Route 66 that once spanned Chicago to Santa Monica, and you can still get a vivid sense of what it was like before modern freeways.

On your own time, you traverse a landscape reflecting America’s kaleidoscopic variety, each town unique in its geography, lifestyles, industry, food and pastimes. This colorful pageant of Americana is what the interstates and their environs deny us. In its place, we’re fed bland cultural pabulum for mile upon monotonous mile; a landscape strategized, formulated and set in place by indifferent strangers in a far-off boardroom instead of by the locals in their own front rooms. …

But in paring off those few minutes and miles, we’ve also doomed ourselves to miss that hoagie, that cheese steak, that spiedie sauce, or that slab of Flint’s barbecue, not to mention that clunky cup of MJB served by a waitress named Dot whose greeting comes from her own head instead of some corporate manual, and who reminds us that the real America is still out there, beyond the off-ramps and down the road.

Read the whole thing. Kuralt would agree with its sentiments.