I don’t like road trips. And I’ll tell you why.

Sure, there’s the whole being trapped in a car for hours eating Big Macs for days thing, while your legs go numb and you start wondering if it’s possible to die of boredom.

But for me it’s more than that.

I could handle death by French fry. What I can’t handle is driving by all those small towns.

Some people love small towns. My stepdad grew up on a farm, and he loves taking those winding back roads in the country—the ones lined with cows on either side, and green hills and trees, that have blinking red lights because there’s not enough traffic for a single stoplight. Even my mom likes shopping in small towns. She says she finds good antiques there.

But any time I get away from the city and I find myself far from a major highway on one of those two-lane wind-y roads with poorly marked signs, I start to get nervous.

Because the fact is I find small towns creepy. If you’ve ever seen a single horror movie, you know that most of them take place in small towns.

Here’s a short list of what you can find in your typical horror-movie small town: chainsaw-wielding psychos, inbred mutant cannibals, vampires (of the not-Edward, not-so-nice variety), vengeful ghosts, evil witches, haunted houses/hotels/entire towns, crazy murderers who’ve turned the town into wax figures, and on occasion, entire high schools taken over by aliens.

And that’s just what happens in movies. There are all those TV  …