I agree that getting off the interstate can be a Back in 1979 I drove across the country photographing firehouses. When we were in Seattle a friend took a look at our road atlas and put his finger on some tiny spot in Kansas and asked us to report back what we saw. (He was getting a Phd in geography I think.) What we saw was a town with a handful of houses, a decrepit looking silo, a gas station that no longer served gas and a part time post office. We had a very interesting conversation with the woman who ran the post office about what had happened to the town and where business, schools etc had gone.
We are going to China, and it turns out that guidebooks can be downloaded to your Kindle or parts of them as pdfs to your computer.