Once upon a time, my family drove to Florida and experienced American life at its finest.

We took old roads – the kind that wove through peanut plantations and past giant weeping willow trees in the deep, deep south. We stopped at orange-roofed Howard Johnsons for cold glass bottles of coke and at Stuckey’s for sticky, marshmallowy pecan logs.

We rolled our windows down and stuck our heads out into the hot humid air and we begged to stop at alligator farms and local museums that promised to show us the world’s biggest bottle top collection or rows of autographed baseballs.

That trip is so implanted in my memory that I can still taste the pecans we bought in Georgia or the ham in Virginia, and I remember each and every iconic billboard that advertised an America I hadn’t known existed somewhere just south of my childhood.

I saw a country on that trip that doesn’t seem to exist anymore – at least from the driver’s seat.

I had the occasion recently to drive to Florida to visit family, and these days, it’s all about the super highways. Yes, super highways and exits, and it doesn’t matter what state you’re in. It’s the same stores and restaurants over and over again.

You get on that highway and you point your car south and you drive 75 mph because you’re in a hurry. Everyone these days is in a giant hurry and there’s no time to seek out the authentic.

I stopped to pump my own gas in soulless, lifeless truck stops and remembered the old filling stations of my childhood where an old man in overalls walked up with a squeegee in his hand to fill your tank and discuss the weather.

“Sure is a beautiful day,” he’d say, gazing up at the sky. “Say, where ya’ll from?”

Gone on this trip were the diners I remembered selling biscuits and gravy and real orange juice and peach pie. You can go to the same restaurants on the road that you have at home and everywhere you go, whether it’s Paris or Lima or Charleston, South Carolina. If anything was disheartening about my trip, that was the worst – knowing the dishes that make a place a place were not within my reach. I think chain restaurants reproduce like rabbits and plop themselves down in the heart of such beauty and destroy the view.

I drove through big cities like Memphis and Birmingham and for miles and miles there were big box stores and giant groceries and stop lights and traffic. To get a taste of a historic, storied place like Birmingham, it’s not possible to discern it from the window like it once was. You have to get off the exit and go and find it yourself, hope that you run into a local character to give you directions, or find a place to eat that gives you some idea of what Birmingham tastes like.

Finally, I had to take an old road from Monterey, Alabama, to Tallahassee, Florida, and it was there that I finally got to glimpse just a sliver of the old America. I drove by cattle ranches, fields of peanuts, lemon and orange trees.

The air smelled sweet, the way the old south should smell – a cross between exotic flowers and tropical fruits. And there were a few souvenir stands along the side of the road, housed in old tumbling shacks with giant bags of oranges hanging from the rafters.

The girl inside sold me boiled peanuts and we talked about the weather, about the winter we were having up north and she gave me a pecan log for free because I almost cried with joy when I spotted one.

But there were abandoned shacks like that all along the road that once sold tacky coffee cups and key chains – all closed now with sagging roofs and rotting wood. Those shops are as much a victim of the super highways as we are. No one goes that way anymore.

Except for me.

I threw soggy peanuts shells from my car window all the way down that road, turned up the music, had the window rolled down to let in the humid air, to smell something real in the world.

And I thought about something for miles and miles – about how for the longest time I’ve been craving authenticity in my life, from people and places and food and experiences. It’s hard to find sometimes what is truly real and it makes me yearn for another era, another America.

My children will never miss it because they don’t know it was ever there. They don’t remember local dime stores that sold sodas at a counter and had creaky wooden floors and yarn and castor oil in the same aisle.

They’ll never know the man at the local hardware store who knew just what you needed, and they’ll never visit the alligator farm on their way to Florida or count the billboards to their next soda pop.

And this all makes me undeniably sad, because what has replaced the old America is characterless and soulless and now endless in every direction.

And I’m not sure which is worse, remembering it nostalgically or not knowing it was there at all.