The unrelenting sameness of Nebraska packs more frustration than a thousand stubbed toes. Still, it's not without the odd spike of drama: One afternoon I passed an overturned truck and, next to it, a farmer chasing an escaped pig. But for all its monotony, Nebraska has an achingly beautiful, life-affirming ending: Wyoming. In Wyoming, the sky was blue, the brown hills were patchy with snow, and a crisp wind was blowing off the Laramie Mountains, white and pretty in the distance.

The grandeur builds as you continue west, whipping itself into a heady crescendo of mountain peaks, pine forests, and rushing rivers, and culminating in Highway 1, the inspirational two-laner that clings to the pleasingly savage shoreline between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The drive delivers such West Coast paradises as Carmel-by-the-Sea, San Simeon, and, by midafternoon, Morro Bay, where the American Dream reaches its apotheosis.

A farmers' market was in full bucolic swing on Morro Bay's main street. Locals had emerged from their cute seaside homes to buy organic soap, homemade salad dressings, strawberries, candles, nuts, dried fruit. The transactions were all conducted in such an agreeable manner that they seemed more like old-time bartering than instances of twenty-first-century capitalism.

As it happens, the American economy is not only the world's biggest but also one of the most well mannered. Even New York, a city that does $2.6 billion a day in business, seems reserved compared with Istanbul, where street vendors shout at passing pedestrians to buy corn on the cob or roasted nuts, or the Ukraine, where grandmothers hawking pierogi, beer, toys, and smoked fish swarm train platforms in such numbers that foot traffic all but comes to a halt. And none of these places approaches the capitalist frenzy raging in the tourist enclave at Badaling, next to the Great Wall of China, where vendors scream through megaphones at passersby in the belief that this will induce them to purchase Great Wall etchings, postcards, and knockoff People's Army parkas.

If you look out at the Pacific in Morro Bay, you cannot help but notice Morro Rock, a half-sunken dome of granite. It's bluntly decorative, like some remnant of mid-seventies landscape design before we understood that a good water feature demands a certain measure of subtlety. And yet it's every bit as place-defining as the Eiffel Tower or the Faraglioni rocks, Capri's molto famoso outcroppings, which catch the early-evening light so perfectly that you'd swear someone put them there just for that reason.

To anyone traveling around the world without an airplane, the Pacific is the mother of all obstacles. It covers half the globe at an average depth of 14,000 feet and is larger than all of the earth's landmasses combined. In other words, it is the planet's only feature that gives some inkling as to the immensity of space. My cruise ship, the Crystal Symphony—a 51,044-ton vessel powered by four diesel engines—took 17 days to cross the Pacific. Nothing else—not the Atlantic (which I sailed in 6 days), not Siberia (which I traversed by train in 6 days), and not even Nebraska (which I drove across in a single day that felt like 6)—approaches its vastness. On the horizon, there are only waves. Beyond them, more waves.