In 1962, towards the end of his life and the year he won the Nobel Prize, John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) drove around the United States with his French poodle, Charley, and wrote of the experience in Travels with Charley.   Recent exploration of Steinbeck's journals and the journey itself suggest that many encounters were fictionalized. (Read more here.) In reality, his wife accompanied him, and he stayed at more than one high-priced hotel, apart from the people he sought to know.  
Personally, I don't mind. Steinbeck was always a fan of large mythological figures and language like "the night was full of omens"; it's no surprise he mythologizes himself. Doris Lessing once said, "No doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth." Even fictionalized, his journals give us insight into this man and into America as he saw it.

Steinbeck found his beloved pet the most suitable companion.

He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course, his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

A man who once let the rhythms of America run through his fingers like a handful of water admitted he was removed, even homesick. He also felt restless. An urgency saddled Steinbeck his entire life, a tension to move yet a need—as a writer—to remain still.   Perhaps you are feeling some restlessness, now that I mention it, and want to find some companions. Look into Graham Greene's memoirs, a man who did much to avoid boredom, or van Gogh's letters where he often projects the energy of a man unable to settle. Modern artist Francis Bacon drew on a restless, boundless energy in order to focus on the one central truth portrayed or implied.  
Also of interest to you might be this look at how we expense ourselves through time, "Pace, Breaks, and the True Nature of Play."

Like George Orwell, who lived among the poor anonymously in Paris and London, Steinbeck knew "I must travel alone" and "incognito."

"General Grant" sequoia, named after former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, is estimated to be 1,600 years old. Sequoia National Park, California. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

In this anonymity, Steinbeck enjoyed the unbounded natural beauty of America. Among the California redwoods, he writes:

I stayed two days close to the bodies of giants, and there were no trippers, no chattering troupes with cameras. There is a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates the silence.

The drive spiraled around small towns, mountains, and forests. The writing circles themes of companionship with pets, journeying, the majesty of nature, and, unexpectedly, a measure of alienating peace once they arrive in California, Steinbeck's home state.

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. "One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward," Steinbeck wrote of Yellowstone. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

And yet, Steinbeck reckoned in Travels with Charley that the trip was fruitless. At the end of the journal, he wrote, "My own journey started long before I left and was over before I returned." He saw America, yes, but Steinbeck longed for something he couldn't achieve: his reintegration into America. It is as if he thought America owed him something.

Of all modern writers, the price and alienation of fame came dearest to Steinbeck. I'm reminded how often he wrote of wanting to be left alone.

Marfa, West Texas. "Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession," wrote Steinbeck. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Accompany Travels with Charley with Steinbeck's Working Days, a much earlier but equally gritty and relentless journey of self.

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away, I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me. [...] When I left, I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason.

Travel as a means of self-discovery is time-worn. Like Joseph Brodsky's magnificent essay on Venice or the essays of Laurie Lee, a man who left his small Cotswolds village at age nineteen and never stopped traveling. Or Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a study of the human compulsion to forge paths.