NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — When you bicycle across the country, people tell you their dreams, because they see you are living yours.

"I've always wanted to ..." they say.

They speak of physical challenges to conquer, or exercises of the mind. Of going places or doing more at home.

People are surprised to find themselves talking about whatever mountain it is they want to climb. Something about someone inching from one side of the country to the next brings it out of them.

Craig Pattison, for example.

He clears trees for a living. Last year, he had a little music festival on his western Missouri hilltop. The rains washed the festival out and he took a financial bath. This year he almost broke even.

His words escape from a bushy beard as he speaks of his dream. "I've always wanted to have Willie Nelson play in my backyard."

Waitresses talk about not being waitresses someday. A teenage girl in small-town Kansas, minding her little brother in a park, notices the bicycle with all the bags and offers with curious eyes and a voice as even as the prairie, "I've never been anywhere."

Crossing the country at 12 mph to 15 mph, loaded down, takes about three months. It's hard. This is an enormous country. Who knew?

One astonishing thing about this trip is it can be done at all in this day and age.

In this land of congested suburbs, clogged highways and city clatter, it's possible to go from Washington, D.C., to the Pacific on roads less traveled.

The route is stitched together from lonely back roads and byways. The silence is often vast, broken only by the wail and thunder of the freight train, still the signature sound of America.

In the rain or under a blistering sun, you think of this equation too often — one hour in a car would take you as far as one whole day on a bicycle. One day in a car covers as much ground as a week on a bike. It can all seem so absurd.

But then there are places like Union County, Ky., endless fields of rich-green soybeans.

And the canopy of leaves over the Katy Trail, an off-road path meandering hundreds of miles along the Missouri River and west, in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark.

And the payoff vista after 2,000 miles of traversing east to west — the opening act of the Rockies.

The journey reveals a country in subtle transition. Combines still reap the harvest but GPS systems now guide some of them, satellites steering them precisely down rows.

Little towns are starting to live on the flush side of the digital divide, installing wireless antennas atop grain elevators and using high-speed Internet to snag business and connect to the outside world.

Trade also reshapes the heartland. Trains still snake across the landscape, but many of the freight cars carry the names of Chinese companies sending goods from across the Pacific.

And waves of immigration reach deep into places where neighbors have known neighbors for generations, except when they left for a better life.

More than the beauty of the land, the openness of strangers impresses the transcontinental bicyclist. Police officers escort you to the town park for a free night of camping. People take you in, feed you and give you water. They save you from heat stroke and worry that the headless horsemen of Appalachian lore and the Skin Walkers, evil spirits of the southwestern desert, will get you.

"Take my truck," Carla Weatherly pleads, serving coffee at the Main Book Co. bookstore and coffeehouse in Cortez, Colo. "Drive to Flagstaff and leave it there somewhere safe. I'll come get it."

She had just told a stranger to drive her pickup five hours into Arizona and somehow she would retrieve it someday. She did not want to see me going through the heat, isolation and ghostly dangers of the Indian lands.

Her offer was so generous it had to be refused. But America is full of people like Carla.

It's full of dreamers, too.

The TransAmerica Trail is the mother road for cross-country bicyclists. It dates to 1976, when a group called BikeCentennial, now the Adventure Cycling Association, laid out the 4,248-mile route between Astoria, Ore., and Yorktown, Va.I began in Washington, negotiating the heavy traffic of northern Virginia and joining the TransAm in Charlottesville. Virginia is nearly 400 miles long when riding to its southwest corner, with much steep climbing in the Appalachians.Dogs and more hills are the challenge of Kentucky. Coal trucks on narrow roads, too. A scream, "Get outta here," makes the dogs turn tail and run.Deep in hills and hollows, heat exhaustion brought me to the door of Mary Hale, who provided ice water, lunch and encouragement. She shrugged off an apology for interrupting her day. "I was just downloading gospel songs on Yahoo."In pastoral Union County, a farmer pulled up in a pickup, then a neighbor, also curious about the guy on a bike. "I don't like to travel," the farmer said. "I like to know where the sun comes up and where it goes down every day."

Two days across southern Illinois brought me to the Mississippi River along empty levee roads.Adventure Cycling publishes authoritative maps of the TransAm and other routes, laying out terrain, history, quirks and services of each section. On the banks of the Mississippi, the course ahead looked daunting — the Ozarks, more big hills on twisty roads with no shoulders.I go 70 miles north to the off-road Katy Trail running across much of Missouri. The nation's longest rail-to-trail route, at 225 miles, it demands no steeper climbing than the trains of past centuries could manage.

In Kansas, the wind rules. At your back, it makes you sail. Coming at you, it's like swimming upstream in molasses. Mostly it came at me, out of the southwest.The trees thin out rapidly after eastern Kansas, yielding to the otherworldly beauty of rolling grasslands. There and in the arid western Plains, services of any kind become infrequent. Hot howling headwinds slow progress to 7 mph. Temperatures are over 100.You can sense the Rockies days before you see them. The pancake flatlands now have a subtle upward tilt.

Colorado offers many features not seen since the East. Among them: coffee chains, suburban sprawl, wide shoulders and Democrats.After offering her truck in Cortez, Carla Weatherly explained why she and her husband, Warren, wanted to help me get across the desert ahead. It had something to do with their own dreams."We are two souls with a wanderlust and love hearing about others who are free to travel," she said. "You would think we were settlers hungry to hear of outside news."She wrote in December to say Warren had just been killed in a workplace accident. Police said he was crushed doing roadwork.

A loop through northern New Mexico. A rain-slicked stretch of historic Highway 66 in Arizona. A rental-car drive across the worst of the Mojave Desert. Then the smog of southern California. Land's end is at Newport Beach, some 3,500 miles from the start.

Over three months on roads less traveled, I didn't hear America singing, as poet Walt Whitman did in his exuberant tribute to a rising nation.I didn't hear it whining, either, as cynics do today.I saw America going about its business without fuss.It waved from front porches, fixed up houses, talked about the day and the times in little coffeehouses.Grew fields of soybeans and sunflowers, saw the sun come up and go down in the same sky each time, ran trains that thundered and wailed.Downloaded gospel songs.Dreamed.