Flying has become an odd default. When I do it I fall into the drill like everyone else: dutifully arriving two hours in advance, disrobing for security to whatever extent is necessary, bringing my lunch (no liquids, of course), and a blanket and pillow—it’s almost like camping. Coach seats in most planes are so close together that the last time I flew I got a bruised kneecap when the woman in the seat ahead of me abruptly reclined. (There may not be many meals served in the sky these days, but the trays are still in the seatbacks, and on direct impact they’re lethal.)

I understand that, barring a blizzard in the Midwest or lightning in Atlanta, flying is the fastest way to get places it can be the only viable option. If alternatives are available, however, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

Taking the train is a captivating experience and if you’ve never done it, you’re missing something that is both affordable and sublime—it’s also the most environmentally sound means of travel short of a bicycle or your own two feet. There’s romance to the railroad, a combination of classic movie scenes remembered and timeless Americana outside the windows from sea to shining sea. As a passenger, you get to snuggle into a big, comfy seat and, if you’re one for talking to strangers, you’ll find your co-riders intriguing.

On one trip, I met a businesswoman from Chicago who told me that when the pressures pile 

up, she books a ticket with sleeper accommodations to and from Washington D.C. She spends the first night unwinding in her private cocoon and devotes the next day to exploring her favorite capital bookshops and dining on international cuisine in the Adams Morgan district. By evening, she’s ready to be lulled to sleep once more by the comforting motion of the car and the soothing hum of the locomotive.

If you’re taking a long trip and you spring for a sleeping room as she did, you’ll get your own little den with practical accoutrements that pull out of the wall: the bed, the basin, the toilet—even an easy chair for reading, working, and gazing at the ever changing landscape. The sleeper car is an engineering tour de force that offers a degree of coziness not readily experienced elsewhere.

Opportunities for going by train are limited in many parts of the country but if there is an Amtrak station near where you live, that train goes somewhere and you owe yourself the pleasure of taking it. Especially if you’re someone who’s always rushing and feeling behind schedule, traveling by train—once a year or even once in a lifetime—tells the despot time that you’re taking control of yours and investing it as you please.

Besides, when you go by rail, you arrive at your actual destination, not in some erstwhile cornfield forty miles out where so many airports are located. And should you have a layover, you’re in the middle of the city so you can actually wander around Boston or St. Louis. And for the rest of your life, when someone asks if you’ve been there, you never have to say, “Not really—I was just at the airport.”

Another option for land-based adventuring, road trips have their own quirky joys, especially if you get off the scenery-starved Interstate and take some state and county highways. This is where you’ll discover towns that will make you think you’re in Mayberry or Grover’s Corners or Bedford Falls. You can dine in diners replete with home cooking and nostalgic charm. You can antique in antique shops that are finds in themselves, and talk with family farmers, keen on educating the rest of us about how hard it is to work the land in this day of era-ending competition from corporate agriculture.

When you drive, provided you’re willing to take appropriate detours and make stops along the way, you’ll discover the signature qualities that persist in the various regions of this country, qualities that are muted in more traveled areas by identical fast-food places and warehouse stores. Down here at ground level, you’ll discover America—and maybe even yourself.

Writer and theater director Leonard Peters is a native New Yorker who viewed the rest of the US as a second-class suburb of Manhattan until he took the opportunity to drive cross-country to deliver a car for a friend. Peters headed west over the George Washington Bridge, determined to keep an open mind. He returned after six weeks a changed man who is documenting his experience in a book (still in the works), Love and Awakening in America. “America,” he says, “is an awe-inspiring, breathtaking, and beautiful country like no other I have ever seen. New York City is as unique and special to me as ever, but I see it now as a part of a much more majestic and magnificent landscape.”

These are charmed-life sentiments if I ever heard them.

Lucky charm: Go to the Amtrak website and see where the trains are. Or haul out your atlas and gas up your hybrid (until the great day when we can plug in our electric cars). Then take a little trip and expect, as with life itself, that getting there really will be half the fun.