The absurd part was that less than 48 hours earlier, I had been in precisely the same predicament in northern Greece. I had been hiking through a stunning patch of the planet called the Vikos Gorge, and at about the halfway point, my guide and I heard bells. On the other side of the river, a shepherd was leading his flock of goats to new pasture. His dogs were not at all pleased to see two hikers, and in an instant they were running toward us.

In Greece, the shepherd called off his dogs by issuing a series of long whistles. In Italy, I made it back to the car—lentamente. I sat in the front seat next to Tilde, and adrenaline flushed the following random thought through my brain: The practice of herding is alive and well—I had seen it in China, Mongolia, Greece, and Italy and would encounter it again in France and England.

An hour later, we were sitting on patio chairs under a late-morning sun in a small town called Pruno, which you can get to only by navigating a washed-out, potholed road that has more in common with the unpaved desert tracks of Mongolia than with Italy's gleaming, butter-smooth autostradas.

In Pruno, we ate sausages. Every woman there save Wanda presented her own. (Wanda is too young to have entered the sausage-making stage of her life.) The sausages were sliced, laid out on a card table, and consumed along with homemade wine and cheese made from Podolica milk. Before sundown, we had another sausage maker to visit, as well as the small matter of dinner, which was to start with fresh goat cheese, followed by fried anchovies and homemade pasta blackened with the ink of cuttlefish. We still had to purchase the seafood; curdle the goat's milk; stuff and fry the anchovies; roll out the pasta, cut it into strips, and boil it; simmer the cuttlefish in garlic and olive oil; and then sit down and eat it all.

The driving was slow. The food was slow. Even the eating was slow. But the day was not slow. Slow travel, it would seem, is the province of those seated 30,000 feet above the earth. Then again, to those people, everything seems slow.

That was day 49. Day one began in Brooklyn. The plan for this first leg was to roughly approximate the route Jack Kerouac followed in On the Road, published 50 years ago this month: New York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles. It took Kerouac something like three months. He hitched rides with farm boys, blew his money on beer and whiskey, smoked "tea," wrote poetry, listened to jazz, fell in love with a girl sitting next to him on a bus, and took a long, unproductive stab at picking cotton. In short, the man traveled. I didn't have the luxury of time, but I did have one thing Kerouac did not: I-80, a multilane river of asphalt that would convey me across the continent.

As seen from the highway, a country becomes a film loop of national clichés. In Europe, you notice old forts and crenellated castles crowning hillocks. In China, you pass an advertisement for a golf club that bills itself as "The Royal Celebrity Business Circle with Global Vision." I-80 offers its own predictable montage of barns and silos, gas stations and garbage, roadkill and pickups with bumper stickers that read HERE COMES THE SON. Nowhere is America more American than on the interstate.