This summer, I drove 2,432 miles for our annual family trip back east. When you count coming back to Utah, it was 4,864 miles in total. Don’t think this bothers me — I love driving. Sometimes I imagine I’m Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes, and other times, if the music I’m listening to is just right, I can achieve epiphany on questions my mind has been asking while speeding along. This, as you can imagine, results in my driving just a bit faster than I’m supposed to, and I’ve met a number of highway patrol officers over the years.

When I was a college student, I was driving in Georgia doing about 75 mph. A police officer pulled me over and asked if I knew how fast I was going. He then told me the speed limit was 30 mph, which means I was going 45 mph over the posted speed limit, which is much too fast, even for me. I gasped and responded that where I was from, New York, a road like that would be 65 mph. I’m not sure if he found my argument compelling or if he thought the five sorority sisters I had in my car were cute enough to deserve a pass, but he advised me to drive slower and let me go.

Over the years of driving across this country, I’ve learned that each state has its own vibe. Utah is relatively civilized — you can drive really fast in the rural parts and cruise along in the 70s in the more urban areas. Pretty much you can drive as fast as you want in Wyoming and Nebraska, although I did meet a Wyoming Highway Patrol officer once, so that statement is not entirely true.

When you drive in Iowa and Illinois, things start to change. These states care about construction and will slow you down if there’s any reasonable chance that any worker may want to work. My favorite was the dozens and dozens of miles of one lane in Illinois for no apparent reason at all. In Indiana, they start to charge you for using their highways, which remains true through Massachusetts, but they don’t ask you to pay them. There are signs everywhere saying, “Just drive, we’ll bill you later.” My problem with this is that means those states are clearly tracking your car everywhere you go, and I’m enough of a libertarian that this seems unacceptable. So, I think if I’m going fast enough, they won’t be able to get a picture of my license plate, and I rise to the challenge.

The stretch of Interstate 90 that goes through Pennsylvania has never — and I mean never — been complete. It’s always under construction. Maybe it’s a spot that shouldn’t have a road. Maybe they raise revenue to pay for all the things in Pennsylvania by making you drive 45 mph there and ticketing like crazy. Maybe it’s just Pennsylvania. In New York, they’ve built a rest area every 30 miles so that there’s never a reason to get off the highway, which they call the Thruway. This is a fantastic idea, except when New York decides to renovate all of its rest areas at once so you’re starving, really having to use a bathroom, everything is closed, and there are no signs at exits telling you what services would be available if you got off.

If you haven’t ever taken an epic road trip, you really should. In addition to pretending I’m a Formula One driver and thinking really hard about stuff while listening to loud music, I also think about the pioneers who would have crossed that distance at a lot slower pace. A scene I read as a little girl in “Little House on the Prairie” did not make sense until I was driving across Nebraska. This year, while driving from Martha’s Vineyard up into the Adirondacks, I thought of Henry Knox heading out from Boston to Fort Ticonderoga to steal some cannon from the British. I wonder if he had the same thoughts I did: that Massachusetts is the worst because it’s full of people from Massachusetts driving really slowly in the passing lane.

These kinds of thoughts aren’t possible when you fly into Boston. You’re completely alienated from the history of this country when you fly, or the cool uniqueness of all the states. My favorite sign in Massachusetts said: “1,724 feet — highest elevation east of South Dakota.” If that doesn’t give you a sense of how different that state is from Utah, I’m not sure what else will. But perhaps most importantly, if you fly, you never get to meet all the police officers keeping us safe.

Leah Murray is a Brady Distinguished Presidential Professor of Political Science and the academic director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University.

Newsletter