I first read this book 20 years ago, and recently re-read it. I didn't think too much of it on the first read, but have improved my rating this time. McMurtry has written a different kind of travel book. Instead of exploring a region and engaging with the communities he travels through, he zips along mostly interstate highways while reflecting on the role the roads have played in his life, and on the authors and books about the region. His travels were limited to a few days a trip, and motivated by his desire to rediscover the person he was before his heart surgery several years earlier. He felt compelled to drive, until reaching a location where he didn't any more. ( )

When I began, I really didn't like this book. The author wasn't TALKING about anything at all. Just rambling on about weather and highway conditions and then he started promoting all of the books he had written. And in this book I wrote about...And in that book... Also, he never stopped. He only drove the interstates. How can you know anything about a place without stopping and spending some time? Zipping by at 80 MPH hardly makes you an expert.

Somehow though, after I had passed the midway point of the book, I warmed up to it a bit more. I don't know if he actually started to write something worth reading or if I had simply gotten used to his writing style, but every once in a while I would think, "good point," or "I didn't know that."

And in the very last pages of the book, his journeys brought him somewhat close to my stomping ground and one paragraph made me want to start road tripping as soon as possible:

"Throughout the afternoon and the next morning the realization slowly grew on me that I had accidentally found something I hadn't really expected to find: the dream road, the good-as-it-gets road, the ideal path into the heart of the great steppe. U.S.2 had everything-- the widest vistas, the greatest skies, and more history than any one traveler could possibly hope to exhaust: Lewis and Clark, the Missouri, the mountain men, the Cheyenne, the Sioux, Sitting Bull, the Yellowstone, Teddy Blue." ( )

Kind of disappointed in this. The author is pretty clear in the forward as to his purpose and intentions. I like the travel genre and I was interested in US Highway 281. But this book never gets enough traction to keep my interest. ( )

I’ll say this for McMurtry, when he puts his mind to it he can paint a landscape as well as any author, and weave a story that will keep you riveted. I wish he’d done more of this in this memoir of a year spent traveling America’s major highways. The book is like many major interstates … miles (pages) of mind-numbing sameness, occasionally interrupted by a point of interest. There are a few memorable passages – his father’s encounter with a rattler, the disappointment of what Key West has become, and the attack of the Volkswagen-Beetle-sized tumbleweeds – but mostly I was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel (bookmark). I also was puzzled by his references to “the 10” or “the 281” rather than the more usual “I-10” or “Hwy 281.” I have never heard the roads referred to as McMurtry does, and it made me feel disoriented. ( )

I enjoy traveling. McMurtry's non-fiction travel book turned out to be a disappointment for me. He doesn't attempt to cover every highway or state in his travels, but instead of getting out on the interesting roads, he sticks to the Interstate Highway System for the most part. Then on top of that, he just drives -- sometimes 800 miles or so in a single day. He doesn't take time to savor the experience. About the only stop he made was at Hemingway's house in Key West. During the rest of the book, he sometimes reminisces about another time he was in the area and visited something. The book just kind of fell flat. He did drive through my area, but besides commenting on how awful the road construction was, he only made some remarks about James Agee as he drove through Knoxville. I doubt I'll try to read anything else by McMurtry. I'm not into westerns, and his non-fiction doesn't make the grade either. ( )