The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

by Bill Bryson

But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Some of the shops were just a bit chichi, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county.

These things, these RVs, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go to the moon with less backup.

Having just spent a week and a half on the road, I've seen more RVs than I care to.

America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

There are thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a fact because my father stopped at every one of them.

One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a $200 sweater but not a can of baked beans.

And the toilet seat didn’t have a SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION wrapper on it, denying me my daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors and saying, “I now declare this toilet open.”

The number of people airborne in the United States at any given time (136,000) is greater than the combined populations of the largest cities in each of these four states.