you’d think driving it would have felt significantly faster, but it didn’t. […] And sitting all day in a car was exhausting in a different, more insidious, more worrying way, than knocking out thirty or forty kilometers on foot ever is. The car also erased much of the “psychic pain” of walking the boring parts of the road. A car hypnotizes and lulls. Your eyes glaze as you pass the pachinko parlors or industrial hinterlands. […] And in this way — unlike with walking — the road in totality doesn’t feel so terrible, the terrible bits erased as quickly as you see them. As such, it’s difficult for me to recommend driving it. As I’ve said before (many times before), the point of the walk is to inculcate a pervasive boredom, and from that: a heightened attention. You want to feel like you’re going to go a little nuts from lack of stimulation. It’s in that space where you begin to “feel out” the “true” shape of the road (and with that, the true shape of a country, too). Without the boredom, much of the value of the experience is lost.