My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.

It was fucking bizarre.

There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you're far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.

And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.

But there's something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it's all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.

I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can't be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.