For many motorists, highway rest areas are more than simply places to stop for a bathroom break.

They also serve as visitor centers that welcome out-of-state drivers not just with free maps and travel brochures but also with appealing, museum-quality exhibits highlighting historic and natural attractions.

Vermont's handsome rest area on Interstate 91 just north of the Massachusetts border, for instance, is housed in a spectacular glass, stone and native wood structure that could pass for a chalet. A similarly elegant center in New Hampshire even serves free apple cider in season.

Both centers also includes fountains that dispense free, refreshing, pure water. Just about every highway rest area in the country, it turns out, has public drinking fountains.

But here in Connecticut, as Day columnist David Collins pointed out Wednesday, the only way to get a drink at one of the new highway plazas is to buy a soda, or a bottle of water, from a fast-food franchise or ask for a cup that you have to fill from a restroom faucet.

Whose bright idea was that?

Apparently this miserly, not to mention unecological, approach is designed to force thirsty travelers to pay for beverages, thereby boosting restaurant revenues from which the state gets a cut.

For a state so dependent on tourist dollars, we can't think of a worse way to greet visitors. It reinforces the stereotypical legend of Connecticut's nickname, "the Nutmeg State," supposedly derived from unscrupulous Colonial traders who whittled "nutmeg" out of wood and tried to pass it off as authentic spice.

Whoever thought of keeping water fountains out of Connecticut's new highway rest stops should get stuck in traffic on I-95 for 12 hours on a hot Sunday in August in a car with no air conditioning after eating a bag of pretzels.