Americans Behind the Wheel

 I later found out that the English, who don't have nearly as much ground to cover, tend to view the American approach to highway travel as somewhere between baffling and pathological. A couple of years after I got out of college, some English friends of mine were given a ride from northern Spain to Paris by an American we all knew, and to their astonishment he drove straight through without stopping. They came to the conclusion that he was suffering from a latent death wish. I informed them that our mutual friend had merely driven from northern Spain to Paris the way any red-blooded American boy would drive from northern Spain to Paris: he made good time.

- Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice