When traveling by car in the US, the whole franchise/chain restaurant thing does drive me nuts sometimes. I used to just think I could head into a town and I'd find a diner (love them) or at least a reasonable restaurant or bar. However, often there's nothing in the town anymore, it's all just avenues of franchises on the outskirts near the highway.
Now I tend to look on Yelp or sometimes even on my GPS and just type in 'diner' or something. Sometimes I've gone well out of my way to find somewhere decent. It's becoming less of a problem now though as Yelp and similar websites get more and more content.