As part of our summer Travel issue, dedicated to driving across America — that enduring rite of passage for so many impassioned travelers — we collected snapshots of U.S. road trips undertaken by 13 creative people. We asked each of them to tell us about their most meaningful journeys and what made them so indelible. The destination? Certain detours and pit stops? Who sat beside them in the car, or who they met along the way? Their answers were as varied as their routes, but the underlying reason for each boiled down to one simple fact: Few other types of vacations fuel the imagination as effectively as a long, meandering drive.

When my husband, Peter [Bradley], and I were in that vague, wild time when we were transitioning from being friends to lovers, we decided to go to Nashville on a whim. We were working at this Mexican fusion restaurant in Philadelphia and, after getting off an unexpectedly busy Sunday shift, we drove all night. We were young, and that seemed like a good idea. A friend had made us a mixtape with a country song for every year from the ’50s to the 2000s. One of them, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers, inspired a song on my new album called “Men in Bars,” which is similarly about a guy pleading with his girl not to go out. We took a picture in front of the Nashville sign, we ordered meat and threes and we went to Robert’s Western World. We’d never been to a honky-tonk bar before. One guy had this trick where he’d lift himself up off the body of his upright bass. It was inspiring to see people work that circuit, and it showed me what country music could be. We slept at a gross hotel for a couple of nights and, on the way back home, I broke out in full-body hives at an Olive Garden, so we swung by a hospital. They gave me Benadryl, and poor Peter had to drive for the next seven hours. I think all of the songs I’ve written about him have that trip in their subconscious.

I’d finished filming “Queer Eye” in Austin and wanted to get back to New York but ended up lingering in Texas. I was with my newly adopted pit bull mix, Neon, and Ben Levine, an agent and friend. On our way out of town, we stopped by my favorite bakery, ThoroughBread. They have a peanut butter and jelly cookie they serve warm, and they make kolaches where the egg is somehow a very soft scramble. Then we headed to Waco, where I learned about the empire of Chip and Joanna Gaines [of the show “Fixer Upper”]. Outside their Magnolia complex in town, people were lined up like ants. I tried their famous chicken salad croissant sandwich, which was objectively delicious — it had wonderful lamination. In Dallas, the streets were wider than anything and dead empty because it was June and just so painfully hot. At one point on this trip, the road looked like it was rippling like in that scene from [the 1991 film] “My Own Private Idaho.” We went to this sushi restaurant that had jalapeño-ranch-aioli-drizzled-over-a-rainbow roll-type vibes. Everyone was so dressed up, while I was in shorts and a ripped-up tee. In between stops, there were a lot of heart-to-hearts and a lot of laughs. It takes a specific kind of person, someone who can banter and go deep, and the trip eased my nerves about what was next for me. Ben also showed me how to put air in the tires. This was after a snafu where I’d pretended to know.

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