Iowa.
After sundown.
Everything’s closed.
Nowhere to eat, because even the gas stations at the exits close at 8.
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US education isn’t about learning how to learn, or understanding how facts fit together. It’s about memorization and test taking.
I didn’t appreciate geography and history until I was an adult, and realized is was literally all about the planet I lived on and how people lived on it before me. Then it became fascinating.
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Iowa has no toll roads IIRC, so they don’t have the big 24-hour service centers with inflated captive-audience prices like a lot of the other states do. Just the little places that serve small towns and whomever happens to be passing through on I-80.
Possible explanation for that Ohio leg:
Completely confused by Indiana place names on exit signs, he kept driving until, reaching Toledo, he turned around.
I could understand it better if there was no Indiana between Ohio and Michigan:
As mentioned, 80 to 94 to Michigan, but then hook up with one of the 75s and end up in Toledo, then take 80 back west.
I’ve done at least a dozen different routes on US highways from Cleveland to Chicago, and another dozen straight on the turnpikes and highways from Cleveland to Rosemont for trade shows. One of the wandering trips took in Wisconsin (House on the Rock and the Dells. We’re tourists at heart.)
So you mean he got far enough out where the on-ramp signs said West - South Bend or West -Elkhart or whatever they say, instead of West - Chicago, and Ohio was the next place where they said West - Chicago again?
Got off the tollway and made a wrong turn. The tollway runs only a few miles south of the Michigan border.
I’m guessing:
Illinois >
Indiana >
Went East instead of West
Ohio >
Kept going East for God knows whatever reason
Indiana >
Turned around
Michigan (What the hell?!) >
Got off the turnpike and made a wrong tun
Indiana >
Illinois
Got re-oriented.
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I know a number of people who can’t use maps at all. And it seems to be getting worse. I wonder if the way that modern GPS navigation systems are always spinning and reorienting the map has some effect… It must be hard to visualize where things are in relation to each other when no matter where you go it’s always ‘ahead’.
(That feature disorients me because it seems to be saying we’re going North when we should be going East, so I always turn it off, but that confuses other people.)
Well it is easy to get it mixed up with Formosa, which has a very similar description. 
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If it were up to me all the screens would go dark automatically whenever the vehicle is moving.
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I think those people were always there. They just reorientated the physical maps back in the days. And I know quite a few in my age group who learned their stuff way before “Navis”, as we call those devices in Germany. More often than not they have problems manipulating visual models in their head, i.e. rotating or folding it in their minds, and are prone to confuse left with right. In my obvervation, mind you. I could be prejudiced.
I don’t mind the GPS orientating itself to the car’s direction. For me, it’s not a map at this moment, but some magical 3rd eye that shows what’s in front of me, but what my normal eyes don’t see i. e. if that’s a real road, if it has a name, etc.
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