We’re back from a three-week, 7,500-mile trek across America, my two sons and I. It has been one of those Experiences with a capital E, traversing the country on the diagonal, northwest to southeast and back, in a 24-foot rented RV. We saw what we planned to see: national parks, Civil War battlefields, historic settlements, the Mississippi, the Gulf, the Atlantic, their Orlando grandfather. But that’s not what made the trip an Experience.

What made the trip an Experience was catching a glimpse of a pale green Luna moth with an eight-inch wingspan one night in Checotah, Oklahoma. Or pulling into a gas station in Ogalalla, Nebraska just ahead of a pick-up with an eight-foot statue of Elvis bungeed in the back. Or the humid, buggy night we camped at Eskew's Landing, "Mississippi's Best Kept Secret," a 200-acre former plantation. "There's been an Eskew on this land since 1859," the old woman drawled from behind the counter.

I was there, but I came close to missing it. I was almost too busy being a writer.

For the first few days, as we barrel across Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Arizona, my mind works overtime turning every observation into a story. My reporter’s notebook is on the floor next to me, wedged between the driver’s seat and a shoebox full of triple-A maps. It couldn’t be any closer unless it was on my lap.

Our second morning out, my older son falls asleep riding shotgun, and I sneak a glance at him: the long legs, the lanky arms, the feet that are suddenly two sizes larger than mine. By next summer he will have a deep voice. By next summer he will be giving me that sulky how-can-I-possibly-be-related-to-someone-as-lame-as-you look. There must be an essay in this. I grab for my notebook, balance it on the steering wheel and scribble ideas as we speed across southern Idaho.

Morning three, we drive through heavy fog west of Chicken Creek Reservation in central Utah. The weather looks ominous -- gray and cold and stormy -- and I steel myself for hours of tough driving. But the front I imagine turns out to be only a fog bank, and we are through it and back in sunshine in less than five minutes. I am so buoyed by this, by having something turn out so much better than I expected, that I want immediately to write about it: Hail the pessimist who goes through life pleasantly surprised; pity the optimist who can only be disappointed. I grab the notebook.

Day four, I fill pages with seventy-mile-an-hour scrawls. I am drowning in ideas: "Everyone ought to love the place they live," reads one entry. I write it after watching a girl on horseback gallop across a field next to the highway. The land is baked brown and hard and dotted with scrub, unlovely and, I imagine, unloved. But the girl, her long, chestnut hair streaming behind her, has a huge grin on her face. She loves it.

Next page I write: "RV subculture -- class collision," which comes from pulling into a KOA campground the night before and finding that our assigned space is between a $250,000 motorcoach featuring a washer and dryer, and 50-inch television, and a 1962 Airstream held together by duct tape.

Next page: "The Zen of long-distance driving -- meditation on the interstate." Finally: "Planes, trains and automobiles... how you get there matters." One of my pens is already running out of ink.

On day five, negotiating hairpin turns in Zion National Park, I am struck with an idea for another essay. I go for the notebook but realize I can’t write and keep us on the road at the same time. "Zane," I call to my younger son, who has the better penmanship, "come up front and help me with something." I hand him the notebook and start dictating.

We inch around another switchback, the one-lane road snaking between towering cliffs the color of terra cotta. I keep talking and glance over at Zane to make sure he’s getting it.

Then, I get it: There he is, head buried in a notebook dutifully recording my words in his careful cursive so I can later make a tale out of a moment neither of us is living. Later that day, when we stop for gas, I take the notebook from its place by my seat and put it in an overhead storage cupboard next to a six-pack of Spagettios.