There is a place where the county road runs alongside the interstate for about a mile before peeling away, close enough that you can see the trucks. I sat at that intersection with the blinker on for long enough that a pickup went around me. Left was ninety minutes of two-lane. Right was fifty minutes of four-lane to the same town.
I took the two-lane, because that is what you are supposed to do, and I spent a good part of that summer taking the two-lane every time and writing down afterward whether I was glad. The results were less romantic than I expected and a lot more useful.
What the small road is actually better at
The honest advantage is not scenery. It is scale. On the interstate everything you pass is sized for a vehicle doing seventy, which means signs are enormous, buildings sit far back, and the human-sized details are invisible because they would be unreadable at that speed. On a two-lane you go past a porch close enough to see what is on it.
The second advantage is that stopping is possible. Interstate stopping is a formal procedure involving an exit, a frontage road, a decision, and a commitment. On a small road you pull onto the shoulder because you saw something. I have taken more photographs I still like from unplanned shoulder stops than from anywhere I intentionally drove to.
The third is that the small road puts you through towns instead of past them. That is the whole reason I do this. The interstate was built specifically so that you would not have to go through anywhere, and it succeeded completely.
What the small road is worse at, and it is not a small list
It is slower in a way that compounds. Not just the speed limit. It is the tractor you sit behind for six miles, the three towns with a light and a school zone, the stretch where the surface is bad enough that you slow to fifty on your own. The ninety-minute estimate is generous and I regularly missed it by twenty minutes.
It is more tiring. This is the part nobody mentions. Two-lane driving with oncoming traffic, blind curves, and unpredictable driveways requires continuous attention, and after three hours of it I am genuinely worn out in a way that four hours of interstate does not produce. There is a reason the boring road is boring. It is boring because it is asking almost nothing of you.
And services are unreliable. Gas at the wrong hour is a real problem, food between two and five in the afternoon in a small town is often just not available, and bathrooms are a matter of asking politely somewhere. None of that is a disaster. All of it takes planning that the interstate does not require.
The trip where I got this wrong
I once did an entire long day on small roads out of principle, when what I actually needed was to cover ground. I had a reason to be somewhere the next morning and about seven hours of distance to move. I took the two-lane the whole way because I had decided that was the kind of traveler I was.
It took ten hours. I saw very little, because after hour five I was too tired to look at anything, and looking is the entire reason to be on that road. I arrived at nine at night having had a bad sandwich for dinner, and the next morning I was not much good to anybody. The road was not the problem. Using a road built for wandering as a road for arriving was the problem, and I have made that mistake in a smaller form probably a dozen times.
The rule I use now
I ask whether this stretch is transportation or whether it is the trip. If the driving is the point, the small road wins every time and the extra hour is not a cost, it is the product. If I am moving between two places that matter and the middle is just distance, the interstate is the correct tool and I stop feeling bad about it.
The mixed version works better than either extreme. Interstate for the long boring middle of a day, then off it for the last stretch into wherever I am sleeping, which is when I want to be seeing things anyway and when arriving slowly is pleasant. That pattern has produced more good evenings than any amount of purism.
The thing about interstates I have stopped apologizing for
The interstate has its own texture and I spent years being too snobbish to notice it. The rest areas at odd hours, the particular sociology of a truck stop at four in the morning, the way you can watch a state’s landscape change in one uninterrupted sweep because nothing interrupts you. There is a version of paying attention that works at seventy.
The exits are also where a lot of the country actually happens now, which is unglamorous but true. The motel where I have had the best conversations of any trip was an interstate motel. I was there because it was cheap and close and I was tired, which is why everyone else was there too, and that turned out to be a better basis for a conversation than shared good taste.
How I decide at the intersection now
Three questions, all quick. What time do I need to be somewhere, and is that a real deadline or a preference. How much attention do I have left in the tank right now, honestly, not aspirationally. And is there anything specific on the small road, or am I just choosing it because it is the small road.
That last one catches me the most. Choosing a road for its category rather than for what is on it is how I ended up with a ten-hour day and a bad sandwich. The small road is not virtuous. It is just a different set of trades, and the trades are good ones about two thirds of the time. I take it about two thirds of the time now, and the other third I merge on and put something long on the speakers and cover ground without feeling like a fraud.