John Steinbeck, Highway 12 and the Most Beautiful Place on Earth

"It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to
accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about
it. I had never been to Wisconsin, but all my life I had heard about
it, had eaten its cheeses, some of them as good as any in the world.
And I must have seen pictures. Everyone must have. Why then was I
unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and
hill, forest, lake?"

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

(First published in 2008 in Wisconsinology)