You have to get off the paved road to see where you are

“We all know that it’s possible to drive from here to California and stay at more or less the same motel the entire way, in a landscape where certain elements never change. This might have been an interesting experience thirty years ago when it was still new. It might be an interesting experience is you were V.S Naipaul just arrived here from England. But basically it’s a challenge to one’s powers of describing the humdrum. On the Great Plains — and I’m sure in the rest of America as well — you have to get off the paved road if you want to see where you are.”

Ian Frazier, in They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991)