It’s difficult to say, but the highlight of young Dylan Dethier’s gap year probably was not the time he narrowly avoided being hustled out of hundreds of dollars on a Las Vegas golf course. Nor was it, likely as not, the occasion in which he nearly got in an ax fight with the person breaking into his Subaru.

One thing that does stick in the mind of the author, golfer and college student was “the way people opened their lives to me. They opened their golf courses, their houses … their spare couches. People were really willing to help a kid with a dream.”

Shortly before the start of his freshman year of college, Dethier came down with a travel bug. So, like Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and a host of others before him, he packed his used car and his meager life savings, and set off to see and write about America. Unlike his wandering forbears, he had a very specific goal: to golf in each of the lower 48 states.

Dethier and his family weren’t part of the country club set, and he grew up