Looking in the Weatherglass

Sometimes I am abruptly reminded of just how bad my American geography is. Case in point: today I read Dreadnought by Cherie Priest. This book (which is part of an excellent alternate-history American-civil-war steampunk series, by the by) involves a cross-continental journey from Virginia to Washington state. And they'd keep mentioning things still ahead of them, and I'd think wait, no, that's in the flat bit below the Great Lakes, isn't it?

Take Idaho. Despite the fact that I've driven through Idaho (something I only remembered after confirming its location on a map), I was under the vague impression that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of Iowa. You know, because they put all the states with lots of vowels close to one another? IDEK.

Adding to my problems is that I sort of assume that the Rocky Mountains are the same width, and the same distance from the ocean, the whole way down the coast, something that is plainly untrue. Or maybe I just assume that they continue to be the width of a single governing jurisdiction, and so naturally (in my mind) they end at the eastern borders of Washington, Oregon, and California. Thus I get confused when, in a book, people talk about going through the Rockies to get to Salt Lake City, in Utah.

So yeah. Deeply confused by American geography.