-- Charles Kuralt

MapQuest said it should take 10 hours and 44 minutes to drive the 620 miles to Lutz, Fla., from our home near Sanford.

It took the better part of two days. Those long, slow hours on the road, just the two of us seeking things worth remembering, were well-spent.

Maybe it's because I grew up in the back seat of my daddy's car as he moved from job to job that long roads to distant places have always welcomed me. A good day to me is a tank of gas, a good-hearted companion and an old road through old towns.

This year, our route was U.S. 301, that fading ribbon of asphalt and concrete that, until the interstate highways came through and changed everything, was Dixie's main drag. It might have lacked the mystique of Route 66, but U.S. 301 had its own band of gypsy dreamers.

They were tourists who fled the northern cold for the warmth of Florida. They were migrants who picked peaches, pecans and tobacco. They were runaway hitchhikers and coming-home soldiers, long-haul truckers, wandering minstrels, cowboys and con men. U.S. 301 took them to and through places the pedal-to-the-metal crowd out on I-95 never gets to see.

Places like Manning, S.C., where, since 1909, the Metropol family has been feeding wayfaring strangers at the Central Coffee Shop on Brooks Avenue. It is said to be the oldest restaurant in South Carolina.

George Metropol, who has worked at the family business for 75 years, told us how back in the '40s truckers hauling produce up from Florida came right through the middle of town, and the Central was where they all stopped for coffee.

One of those truckers was my father, and if he were to walk into the Central today, he'd see that little has changed. Oh, the pictures on the wall might have faded to brown, and the signed photos behind the counter might be of people few remember, but the coffee is still hot and highway-strong.

There for a ghostly moment it seemed like I could see my old man sitting in the next booth, his trucker's hat perched on the back of his head, a smile and a toothpick under his pencil-thin mustache and a wink for the waitress.

U.S. 301 meanders like a family legend. Some of the places it goes, like Allendale, S.C., are break-your-heart poor. Others, like Statesboro, Ga., are worth stopping in. So we did, killing an hour window shopping, historical-marker reading and art-store browsing.

Riding the old roads is not about making good time. It's about making good memories, like the smell of woodsmoke from that classic little roadside barbecue joint in Baldwin, Fla., where harried waitresses gave as good as they got in mock arguments with customers. Or the taste of the fresh-squeezed juice at The Orange Shop in Citra, Fla., where northbound tourists once loaded the car's back window with bags of oranges and grapefruit for family and friends in the Snow Belt. A few still do.

I didn't find my father's ghost on U.S. 301. But his memory came back sweet and strong, like George Metropol's coffee.

Maybe that's the most we could ask of a road trip.