The thing that made traveling across the land so strange was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed

From Naked Prey by John Sandford

The thing that made traveling across the land so strange, Lucas realized, was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed. Driving almost anywhere else, the road moved: you went up and down hills and around curves and past houses, speed zones came and went, cars and trucks went by, and something new was always popping up. Out here, the road was dead straight, with hardly anything on it, or at the sides. Rather than whipping around a curve over the crest of a hill, and finding a town tucked away, surprising you, here the towns came up as a slowly growing lump on the horizon; you could see them, it seemed, for hours before you arrived.

He is talking about northern Minnesota but I have encountered this experience in a number of parts of the world.  Places where the terrain is so flat and the roads so straight and the land so empty, that you are essentially on autopilot for hours at a time.  Moving is merely the observed passage of time.

In Australia, with vast, empty interiors, they have road-trains.  Ted Egan I think has a song about one including a line to the effect that in Northern Territory you can simply tie the steering wheel in place and take a nap.  Not unlike this chap.

Double click to enlarge.

UPDATE:  Not Ted Egan, Slim Dusty with either Road Train Blues or Lights on the Hill.