The run south from Knoxville crosses ridge-and-valley country that carries more history per mile than nearly any other interstate segment in the Southeast, and almost all of it is invisible at seventy-five miles an hour.
Cleveland, Athens and Dalton are each a few minutes off an exit. So is Chickamauga, among the oldest and largest military parks in the country, where the ground has been kept deliberately close to how it looked in 1863 and where the detour costs less time than stopping for lunch.
Dalton is the stop I would argue hardest for, and it is the one nobody makes. The town produces a substantial share of the carpet in American houses, an industry that shaped everything about the place including a Latino population that has been there for decades and that most travel writing about north Georgia still has not noticed.
The Ocoee and Hiwassee river country lies east of the highway through this stretch, close enough that a driver with a spare afternoon can see water that Olympic paddlers have raced on.
Further south, the road passes within reach of towns whose names appear in the civil rights record without appearing on any brown sign, and a driver who wants that history has to go looking for it deliberately.
The finished piece marks the exits that repay a stop and the ones that do not, in order, with the drive-time penalty attached to each so the decision can be made at speed.