A road which seems most seductive on the bicycler's road map may be a sea of sand or a veritable quagmire, but with a fine bicycle path at the side.

As you get farther east these cinder paths are protected by law, with heavy fines for driving thereon; it requires no little restraint to plough miles and miles through bottomless mud on a narrow road in the Mohawk valley with a superb three-foot cinder path against your very wheels.

The machine of its own accord will climb up now and then; it requires all the vigilance of a law-abiding driver to keep it in the mud, where it is so unwilling to travel.
So far as finding and keeping the road is concerned,--and it is a matter of great concern in this vast country, where roads, cross-roads, forks, and all sorts of snares and delusions abound without sign-boards to point the way,--the following directions may be given once for all: If the proposed route is covered by any automobile hand-book or any automobile publication, get it, carry it with you and be guided by it; all advice of ancient inhabitants to the contrary notwithstanding.
If there is no publication covering the route, take pains to get from local automobile sources information about the several possible routes to the principal towns which you wish to make.
If you can get no information at all from automobile sources, you can make use--with great caution--of bicycle road maps, of the maps rather than the redlined routes.
About the safest course is to spread out the map and run a straight line between the principal points on the proposed route, note the larger villages, towns, and cities near the line so drawn, make a list of them in the order they come from the starting-point, and simply inquire at each of these points for the best road to the next.
If the list includes places of fair size,--say, from one to ten or twenty thousand inhabitants, it is reasonably certain that the roads connecting such places will be about as good as there are in the vicinity; now and then a better road may be missed, but, in the long run, that does not matter much, and the advantage of keeping quite close to the straight line tells in the way of mileage.
It is usually worse than useless to inquire in any place about the roads beyond a radius of fifteen or twenty miles; plenty of answers to all questions will be forthcoming, but they simply mislead.

In these days of railroads, farmers no longer make long overland drives.
It is much easier to get information in small villages than in cities.

In a city about all one can learn is how to get out by the shortest cut.