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FOR a moment I doubted my eyes. Was I wishing it into existence? Dreaming it?

Then, drawing closer, I grew certain that the stripes on the horizon — the ones rising above a fast-food tree line of McDonald's and Taco Bell logos — were indeed orange and white. That they did form a telltale consonant near the end of the alphabet.

That after 4 days, 10 states and 20 drive-through meals, I had the shimmering W of a Whataburger in my sights.

"There!" I pointed. "Look!"

"I don't see ...," groused my companion, groggy from the fried chicken at Popeyes, the fried fish at Captain D's Seafood and the other fried things at the other fry-happy establishments we had visited that day.

Her protest trailed off, because then she saw. How, she asked, had I spotted the sign from so far away?

Got me. But by that night in Shreveport, La., I had developed a crazy knack for detecting beef patties and sesame seed buns where they weren't readily apparent. I had become a human divining rod for fast-food restaurants, especially untried ones.

And Whataburger, absent over the long stretches of highway east of the Mississippi, was up ahead.

"Dinner," I said, and I pressed the accelerator.

A few weeks ago I embarked on a gluttonous odyssey, with a changing cast of co-conspirators, across this fast-food nation, from New York to California, sea to greasy sea. It was a roving binge as warped road movie: "Transfatamerica." Or maybe, given our cholesterol-oblivious plunge over a nutritional cliff: "Thelma and Disease."

But my goal wasn't to supersize myself. It was to size up and single out the best fast food from familiar national chains, relatively unfamiliar regional chains and tiny local chains I had never encountered. To take the culinary road less traveled, at least by me.

I'm a pampered diner, my diet richer in squab and poorer in chili dogs than most Americans'. As a restaurant critic, I usually eat three-hour meals at beautifully set tables. On this journey, I ate three-minute meals in the driver's or passenger's seat, the dashboard doubling as a buffet, an automotive altar across which Quarter Pounders and bean and cheese burritos, as worthy of assessment as veal sweetbreads and duck liver pâté, were arrayed.

Until I hit an In-N-Out Burger in Torrance, Calif., on the eighth day of my trek, all of my fast food was consumed, as fast food often is, in the car, which smelled worse and worse as the trip went on and on. Like an obtuse houseguest or a Supreme Court justice, the scent of a White Castle slider lingers.

My sample period ultimately spanned 9 days, 15 states, 3,650 miles and 42 visits to 35 different restaurants (I hit some more than once). It bequeathed crucial knowledge and invaluable lessons.

I learned that Pennsylvania abounds in speed traps, West Virginia in roadkill and Texas in tacos, which can be found at Taco Cabana and Taco Bueno, Taco Villa and Taco Casa. A homogenous country? Not ours. The Mrs. Winner's chicken franchises of Georgia gave way to the Carl's Jr. franchises of Arizona, the scenery and sources of carbohydrates constantly changing.

I learned about Culver's, a chain based in Wisconsin that serves floppy burgers on generously buttered buns, and Sawyer's, which makes "Buffalo fingers," slathered with tangy tomato sauce and accompanied by blue cheese dip, at just two locations in Knoxville, Tenn.

I learned about the transcendent utility of Wet Naps — for hands, mouth and steering wheel. I learned that the art of lap dining is best served by dark-colored clothing, and would be even better served by a hazmat suit, because the ketchup, mustard and barbecue sauces on the insides and outsides of sandwiches have a way of going astray.

What occurred with packets of red paste from a Birmingham, Ala., Chick-fil-A qualified as the Exxon Valdez of condiment spills, and my rented Ford Taurus, like Prince William Sound, was slow to recover.

This adventure required adjustments.

"What do you recommend?" I sometimes asked, out of habit, as I pulled up to yet another drive-through window, eager to sample the best of what a chain had to offer.

The question usually yielded a one-syllable response: "Huh?" So I learned to ask instead about which sandwiches and sides were most popular.

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I made new friends, like Elizabeth Stephens, 69, whose paneled Buick station wagon was parked near my Taurus outside the Varsity in downtown Atlanta.

The Varsity dates from 1928 and has six locations in Georgia, the downtown Atlanta one being the best known. Along with the Culver's I visited in Rockwall, Tex., it was my favorite stop, but it might not have been if Ms. Stephens hadn't recognized my friend Alessandra and me as neophytes and decided to intervene.

She told us to get the chili slaw dog, an inspired creation that layers coleslaw atop the chili atop a meaty, smoky hot dog, producing a riot of textures and hot-cool sensations that I'm determined to experience at least once again in this life.

She wisely pushed the onion rings, real slices of slippery onion under crunchy, oily shells. And she insisted on an appendix to our order when she realized that we were about to skip dessert.

"You didn't get the peach pie?" she said.

"No," I answered. "Should we?"

"Honey," she said, "you're in Georgia. You have to get the peach pie."

We got the peach pie. It was similar in shape and construction to a McDonald's apple pie, and I could have done without it.

I visited McDonald's three times, in three states, because I didn't want to shortchange the giants. But the fast-food universe is infinite, so I had to set some limits.

No pizza. No submarines. No Long John Silver's, at least not after Captain D's, where the butterfly shrimp should be called gypsy moth shrimp and a mash of putative crab put me off seafood for a while.

No Chipotle or Fuddruckers or restaurants without a drive-through window or at least the spirit of one, except for a Baja Fresh in Ontario, Calif., the inadmissibility of which I realized only after paying nearly $20 and waiting 15 minutes for lunch for two. The cheese and pork quesadilla was terrific, and would easily have made my list of 10 favorites, but it wasn't fast food.

I made comparisons. The fries at Hardee's were better — crisper, more substantial in feel and taste — than the fries at McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Jack in the Box.

But the tots at Sonic, a chain prevalent in the South, were the sultans of spuds. Since all of these potato variants are about exterior crackle, not interior vegetable, the tot configuration, with more crests and buttes and ridges, won the day.

The runner-up, for much the same reason: McDonald's hash browns, sculptured by unseen Michelangelos of fast food into what is essentially one mammoth, oblong, scrumptious tot.

It wasn't until Tucson, and the eighth day, that I had this glistening potato cake (a two-Wet-Nap item) along with a slightly soggy Egg McMuffin, which I enjoyed less than a "ciabatta breakfast sandwich" from a Jack in the Box in Fort Worth.

The major chains love to throw around foreign-sounding terms, like ciabatta and frescata, which is the name of a selection of tasteless deli-style sandwiches at Wendy's, where the best bet remains the economical, healthy chili.

Or they just bluntly declare an item to be ethnic, ipso fatso. McDonald's puts slices of white meat, snow peas and mandarin orange sections on iceberg lettuce and calls it an Asian chicken salad, a few bites of which rightly prompted Alessandra, blond and blue-eyed, to say, "It's about as Asian as I am."

I noted, for the sake of argument, that it had what tasted vaguely like Russian dressing and that the eastern expanse of Russia fell in the designated continent.

"O.K.," she said, "it's a Eurasian chicken salad."

She got the middle stretch of the trip, a southern swing heavy on fried chicken and jalapeño poppers. My friend Kerry got the first stretch, which meant the lackluster roast beef sandwiches at a midsize Midwestern chain called Rax and, at Gold Star Chili, the single worst item of the journey.

It was a gummy nest of thin noodles, which were covered by a watery chili, which was in turn covered by rubbery orange confetti that bore a passing resemblance to cheese. Several hours after this starchy insult, as we barreled south toward Knoxville, Kerry moaned, "Ewwww."

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It came out of nowhere. I shot him a puzzled look.

"Flashback," he explained. "Gold Star."

My friend Barbara got the final stretch of the trip, a southwestern route of burritos and more burritos: with and without rice, with and without sour cream, planned burritos and serendipitous burritos.

We pulled off the highway near Odessa, Tex., to hunt down a Taco Villa and, across the street, espied something called JumBurrito, an even smaller Texas chain. Taco Villa's grilled chicken burrito had a profusion of chicken that indeed tasted grilled, while JumBurrito's combination burrito redeemed dull beef with vibrant avocado.

Neither approximated the majesty of the burrito I loved most, which I ate in Dallas, at a Taco Cabana. A great burrito is a balancing act, and the proportions of ground beef, beans, sour cream and diced tomatoes in Taco Cabana's plump, heavy Burrito Ultimo (three Wet Naps) were spot on.

The Taco Villa and the JumBurrito I visited shared a stretch of road with Bush's Chicken, a purveyor of chicken fingers (as puffy with batter as a chinchilla is with fur) in the Odessa-Midland area. Throughout the country, I spotted and sampled more of these geographically contained fast-food players than I had expected to.

Near Allentown, Pa., there was Yocco's, which proclaims itself the "hot dog king," probably because no one who has had the misfortune of eating there would. In central Louisiana there was Raising Cane's, which dutifully and competently serves the chicken finger needs of residents of that state and of nearby ones.

And, in El Paso, where Barbara and I stopped after Odessa, there was Chico's Tacos. We visited the Chico's closest to the highway, just across the street from a "do-it-yourself pest control" store called Bug-a-Boo. Barbara hogged the stewed beef burrito. I retaliated by hogging the beef flautas, oddly shaped islands in a spicy soup of tomatoes and chili peppers. I was surprised by how much I liked them.

I was often surprised, beginning with the first day, when I excitedly bit into that slider and realized how treacherous fast-food memories are. If I had ever enjoyed sliders — and I recalled that I had — it must have been when I was drunk. Or hung over.

Three hours and about 125 miles later, I hesitantly bit into a piece of Original Recipe chicken at a KFC. I didn't hesitate before subsequent bites. The battered skin wasn't too peppery, the frequent sin of much fried chicken to come. The flesh was positively juicy. And the Colonel, in my book, deserved a promotion to commander in chief.

I expected Chick-fil-A to be good. It didn't disappoint. Its standard chicken sandwich, a lightly coated breast fillet with little adornment, was meaty and tender, and the bun cradling it couldn't have been fluffier. We need more Chick-fil-A in New York City. (There's just one branch, at New York University.) We need it fast.

We need Dairy Queen even faster. Among all the incarnations of candy-studded soft ice cream I tried, including the McFlurry, the Frosty and the Sonic Blast, the Blizzard reigned supreme. It had the most candy most thoroughly integrated into the most sumptuous frozen cradle.

This was true of the Georgia Mud Fudge Blizzard. Of the Brownie Batter Blizzard. Check back with me in a year or two about the other Blizzards — I hope to work my way through all of them. If my obituary reads, "perished in a Blizzard," you will know that I died a happy man.

I ate more burgers than anything else, and came to several conclusions.

Flame, or at least a suggestion of grilling or broiling, matters. That's a principal reason a Whopper bested a Big Mac, cooked on a griddle. It's why the new roster of one-third-pound charbroiled Thickburgers at Hardee's tasted better than the steamed slivers at Krystal, a White Castle analogue in the South.

Buns matter. The large, doughy one on the classic Whataburger created ample space for three slices of tomato and a sense of heft that felt good in the hands, good in the mouth. The generously buttered, crisply toasted ones on Culver's burgers, called butterburgers in honor of those buns, exalted whatever they encased, which included seared, loosely packed patties with more charred edges and, as a result, more flavor.

Produce matters, and the ratio of produce to patty size matters, which brings us to In-N-Out. This California chain inspires worship, and I understand why. The burgers tasted fresher than most — though, like seemingly all fast-food burgers, they were cooked to a temperature well above medium — and the vegetables atop them tasted even fresher. The juicy tomato and cooked onions on an "animal-style" cheeseburger were revelations.

But they obscured the thin patty they were meant to accessorize. A double cheeseburger remedied this shortcoming somewhat, but not entirely. In its case, too, the produce — whole-leaf lettuce as well as tomato — registered as strongly as the beef. I liked In-N-Out but I had my issues with it.

Or maybe I was just too stuffed by that point. On my way there, driving alone through Santa Monica, Calif., I had suddenly found myself swerving to the right, parking yet again, ordering anew. The divining rod was at work, and it pointed me to Tommy's, another California chain.

Tommy's pours a pasty, forgettable chili over just about everything. Nestled behind the steering wheel, I nibbled on a chili-strangled hot dog and a chili-mugged double cheeseburger and then collected the latest round of voluminous, odiferous trash. What were these mushy, orange squiggles? Gold Star, the indigestion that keeps on giving.

I was almost done. I was mostly content. On the right road, with the right company, there may well be as much satisfaction at the low end of dining as there is at the high end. There's certainly as much bounty.

On the next and last day of my adventure, I whizzed past a Fatburger on the way to a Wienerschnitzel. In pursuit of El Pollo Loco, I disregarded Del Taco. I'd have to save those restaurants for another time. An emptier stomach. A cleaner car.