I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

And so begins Bill Bryson's travel memoir, "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America." Obviously, a great deal of this book resonated with me, and, since arriving in Europe, I have not stopped thinking about a particular paragraph. Fellow Nebraskans, I know you're with me here.

"Directions are very important to [most Midwesterners]. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point in the thicket of interior monologue along the lines of 'We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman, without any clothes on, naked at the day she was born (except for a coonskin cap), came running at us from the southwest...or was it southeast?'

"If there are two Midwesterners present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because the will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane."