I love to drive.

When you’ve been driving for most of your life the car becomes a natural extension of your body and controlling it becomes effortless.

I love to drive.

But I don’t mean driving around the crowded and congested streets and expressways of Chicago. I mean driving across long expanses of highway taking me from city to city and state to state.

I love driving long distances and watching the terrain change from flat to hilly, from hilly to mountainous.

I love driving across huge bridges, crossing rivers and passing over valleys.

I love driving and  daydreaming about the men that laid down these roads. The people that connected our country from coast to coast.

And it boggles my mind to think that someone said, “man, this mountain is in the way, let me just cut through it.”

While driving I fall in love with the land of this humongous country and think of how crossing through one state is the equivalent of crossing through the whole of Europe.

I’m a romantic.

I’m in love with the idea of wide open spaces and Americana.

In a country founded by immigrants from around the world there is little culture that is uniquely American.

But I think of baseball and apple pie. Of fireworks and the stars and stripes. Of road trips and wanderlust. And I crave discovering the America that is just our own.

Not the America portrayed in movies and television. But the hidden America found in small towns off the beaten path.

I want to find the “America the beautiful.” The deserts and lush forests. The farmlands and the swamps. The beaches and canyons. And bask in the country my parents decided to leave their home for.

That is my goal.