Town, State

One of the most frustrating things about driving around the USA is that there are only a handful of place names in the whole country. They're just repeated in each state. That's why people here always give their address in the format of Portland, Oregon. That way you won't confuse them with people from Portland, Maine or Portland, Everywhere Else.

So I can be driving through North Dakota, see an exit for Waco and experience sudden panic that I have somehow wound up in Texas. Then I remember that there's probably at least one Waco in every state. There's actually a list of the Top 10 most common town names in the USA. They are: Fairview, followed by Midway, Oak Grove, Franklin and Riverside (tied), Centerville, Mount Pleasant, Georgetown, Salem, and Greenwood. To give you some idea of just how common these placenames are, there are 10 Fairviews and 15 Midways in Texas alone.

I bring this up because there is a point as you drive across the bridge at the Iowa/Wisconsin border where Thelma pronounced us to be equidistant from Chicago, Illinois and Chicago, Wisconsin. This happened to be the point at which we were programming Thelma. Momentary confusion ensued and was promptly resolved, to be immediately followed by an extended rant on the limited number of place names currently in use.