Ever stop to think how much time you spend on the road. Statistics say the average American spends three hours a day in a car. Many of you keep the road to Augusta hot. I'm up and down I-20 a lot. It's like traveling across a desert.

When I attended Georgia, I traveled Highway 78 from Lincolnton to Athens and back so often I knew what every rock looked like along the shoulders. It was far better than traveling an interstate. There were things to see, places to stop.

Robert Frost urged us to "take the road less traveled" for the lesser-traveled road tells a tale. Miles become pages, trips become chapters, and a story unfolds. I've been traveling Highway 78 to Athens some 42 years now. I can close my eyes and see every curve, every straightway, every point of interest.

Roads crisscross Lincoln County. Its roads include U.S. Highway 378, Georgia Routes 43, 47, and 79, Georgia Spur 220, and a spate of county roads. We spend a lot of time on roads like these with little thought for how they came to be. Most roads owe their existence to ancient animals whose paths evolved into Indian trails. Drive to a nearby town, and chances are you're following in the steps of ancient Creek who tracked game right where your wheels roll. You're traveling in time in a way.

A road has a past, just like you. And over the years, roads change, as we do ... widening, new looks, and aging. Roads die too. On Hunting Island, down below Beaufort, South Carolina, U.S. Highway 21 crumbles into the Atlantic Ocean. A victim of coastal erosion, 21's demise proves that nature can do in anything man builds.

Life is a journey and a road provides a fitting metaphor for life. Numerous songs have been written about highways. "The Long and Winding Road" ... "On The Road Again" ... "Life Is A Highway" ... and "Big Log" by Robert Plant. And the taillights dissolve in the coming of night ... Driving me down the road ... Sensing too well when the journey is done.

Americans have long had a love affair with road trips. Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, a largely autobiographical work based on road trips Kerouac and friends made across mid-century America. From 1960 to 1964, "Route 66" aired weekly over CBS. Two drifters in a Corvette on a cross-country odyssey encounter loners, dreamers, and outcasts in small towns and cities along U.S. Highway 66.

My memories of roads take me back to nights and days of yesteryear. Watching a long string of red taillights as fans made their way back to Lincolnton after a Red Devil road victory. Coming home late one night from Athens with the flu ... didn't think I'd make it, family trips in the fall through the mountains, and long lonely trips to West Virginia.

Winding along like a ribbon laid upon the face of the earth, roads can enhance the character of the land. I've always loved dirt roads. They're picturesque. I remember seeing a car barreling down a dirt lane near Partridge Town eons ago, a billowing wake of dust settling onto the purplegreen leaves of corn. Seems we pave every road we can these days and cars trailed by clouds of dust only take place in movies.

I love old roads more than I do a freshly topped highway with sparkling white stripes. The old roads have character. Remember the centerline of tar? Don't see that anymore. James Dickey described old roads like that in Deliverance. "Up ahead, the road ran between two hills. Lined up dead center between them was a mountain, high, broad and blue, the color of concentrated woodsmoke ... around noon we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy concrete highway of the old days—the thirties as nearly as I could tell—with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward."

And then there were the old blue crushed granite roads. Freshly paved, the heat of a summer day loosened the tar, freeing pebbles to ding and ping against the undercarriage while the gravel yet to come caught the sun and glittered like a field of diamonds.

My favorite roads include the Blue Ridge Parkway, Florida's A1A, Highway 17, and the road from Lincolnton to Athens. The parkway up towards Roanoke, Virginia, is a thing of splendor with resting places as pretty as their names ... Peaks of Otter, Sunset Field, and Groundhog Mountain.

A1A flirts with the Atlantic Ocean as it courses through St. Augustine revealing what's left of "Old Florida."

Like a sea breeze, Highway 17 blows through a Lowcountry land of plenty. Trailing calabash fragrances, it leaves North Carolina to plunge through rice country, court the sea, and roll by old plantations and quaint towns before crossing into Georgia.

Come football season, I travel Highway 78, that old familiar route, motoring past an old nursery, Hogans Store, a vineyard, hay rolls, and spots in the road like Rayle. It's a trip down memory lane. Some roads aren't that memorable though. My least favorite highway? The West Virginia Turnpike.

Driving an interstate saves time but the downside is long stretches of nothingness as the late Charles Kuralt pointed out. "The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody."

Imagine what Lincoln County would be like with an interstate and billboards, a huge median, frontage roads aplenty, and people zooming by giving you no thought. Living where the road is less traveled can be a good thing as is traveling a forgotten byway.

Life on the road ... Now and then I remind myself that driving is remarkable. In fact, it's astounding. You're rolling across the surface of a planet. You are a wayfarer, an explorer, in your own planetary rover with a passport to adventure ... if you're lucky enough to make a true journey on a road where discoveries wait, somewhere over the horizon.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns tompol @earthlink.net