Backwards time (zone) travel

There are a few spots in the US where time travels backwards—sort of. Let me explain. In most places, when you travel eastward from one time zone to another, it gets an hour later. That's just how time zones work. But there are a few odd spots where traveling eastward means setting your watch an hour earlier. And this has nothing to do with Daylight Savings Time. Instead, it results from the bizarre twists and turns of time zone boundaries. In the example above, Paulding, Michigan sits in a little notch in the Eastern Time Zone. So if you travel due east from Paulding, you enter the Central Time Zone—which is an hour earlier. Weird! There are several spots like this, many nicely documented by a site called 12 Mile Circle. What's the value of this tidbit of arcane knowledge? Well, it might help you win a bar bet or two. More importantly, it illustrates that time zone boundaries reflect a patchwork of local politics that don't always make a lot of sense in the big picture.