INTERSTATES are not all alike. True, they all look similar, with their required eight-foot shoulders and 800-meter straight-aways every four miles. But when you look closer, you detect subtleties: How wide the rivers are. What kinds of development patterns prevail . How much gas costs.

Well, gas. I've gone through more of it than a small emirate in the past two years. It's my single-biggest expense after rent. And every now and then, I run into a character at the petrol pump. Such was the case on an ordinary stretch of I-90 in northwestern Ohio.

Gregory Holtapp, 26, from Kapolei, Hawaii, was on his way to surprise his family in eastern Pennsylvania when I stumbled across him at a rest stop. Lacking the money to fly to the mainland, he said, he had bribed a barge captain to let him float across the Pacific with his '67 VW Beetle — on the condition that he work as a shipmate.

Ohio — Greg and his Beetle, bound for Pa.

Eight days later, he arrived in Puget Sound, Wash., and began his transcontinental trek.

"I've come into a lot of problems on this trip," he said. "But there's always a solution. In fact, dealing with all that shit, that's what makes it sweeter."

"That shit" included outdated license plates, malfunctioning windshield wipers, a speedometer stuck on 85 (even in park) a leaking gas tank and a heater that had long since gone the way of the Hippie movement.

But Greg was no layman with this complex machine. In fact, to keep warm, he devised a system whereby a flexible PVC pipe ferried lukewarm air from the fan belt along the interior frame and toward the accelerator, where it kept his feet, as he said, "plenty above frostbite."

And Greg regarded the leaky fuel tank as an especially spellbinding project: He bought a five-gallon gas can, strapped it to the roof and routed a garden hose across down the rear hood and into the carburetor. What genius!

When I asked him the secret to making the gas contraption work consistently, he looked at me oddly and replied: "Gravity."

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