New York may be America’s greatest city, but it isn’t representative. You don’t need me to count the reasons it is an anomaly, but an especially pertinent one is that New York is a vertical place and America isn’t; to traverse the country by bicycle is to experience it horizontally in the extreme, and the absorption of long distances on the road felt, to me, like the qualifying exam for some enhanced form of citizenship. Immersing myself in the America I hadn’t known turned out to be patriotism-inducing. Excuse me, but what a country!

When I pulled into little towns at dusk in 1993, looking for a diner, a motel and a cold beer (not necessarily in that order), I was received, most often, with curiosity and warmth. Bill Clinton’s first year in office, the first World Trade Center bombing, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., and gay men and women serving in the military were hot-button national issues, but the topic I encountered most was the weather. Voluminous spring and early summer rainfall saturated the upper Midwest and the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, along with several tributaries, causing vast flooding. The worst was over by the time I got there — my weather luck was terrific — but it was a mammoth disaster, and perhaps the mood I encountered was colored by widespread sympathy. Or perhaps we just weren’t at one another’s throats so much back then.

I embark this time with a concern that a lot of Americans share, that we are a fragmented people, more polarized than ever. Polls regularly tell us that a majority of citizens feel the country is on the wrong track, though there is serious and angry debate about what the right track should be. So I wonder how much the current political mood has filtered down to ground level. How well will a complete stranger on two wheels be welcomed now in places he’s never visited? (And oh yeah — how much rain am I going to get?)

What else? Technology. Not long ago I took a morning’s ride on the bike I crossed the country with in 1993; it felt like a Model T. (Well, maybe not so ancient; more like a VW van. In any case, clunky.) For this trip, as a concession to age, I’ve had a bicycle custom-built to my precise dimensions and for the precise purpose of this journey. It has a titanium frame (that is, it’s very light); handlebars that go straight across, rather than drop, to keep me more upright (I’ve got a neck problem); especially durable wheels and tires. (Gearhead alert! You’ll find more technical information in a blog post later this week: nytimes.com/intransit.) It cost about as much as a good — very good — used car.

Besides that, back then, neither cellphones nor personal computers were the ubiquitous human appendages they are today; the articles I wrote about once a week were scribbled longhand in a notebook. I would then phone them in to the newsroom from a motel room or a roadside phone booth and read them aloud into a tape recorder, to be transcribed later.

The series generated more mail than anything I’d written before for the newspaper or have written since, but I had no idea of it until I found the stack of letters on my desk when I got back.