Travel is mostly about dreams—dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting peoples who seem to be citizens of some other country, eating unfimiliar foods, testing your adaptability, or just visiting relatives that live somewhere else in this vast nation, hoping for some sort of revelation. All my traveling life, many years of exploring Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and more, I have thought constantly of home—and especially of the America I had never seen. "I discovered I did not know my own country," Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, explaining why he hit the road at age 58.