I also think of Ohio as being in the middle of the country, so I was surprised to find out that Columbus (where us-east-2 is located) is only about 300 miles from Washington DC, but over 2000 miles from San Francisco.

Most of Ohio is a 6 hour drive from Chicago and 8 hours from NYC. People call it the mid west, but really it's the mid east.

The "west" comes from the perspective of the 13 original colonies. Everything else was called "the west" at one point.

Minneapolis was in the "northwest" until the thirties or later.

Nope, way too far to the east for what I want.

Oddly enough, ca-central-1 is in Montreal... even further east than their Ohio and Virginia data centers.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

Scroll down to AWS Global Infrastructure Map

It seems Central Canada is more philosophical than Geographical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Canada

Nope, way too far to the east for what I want.