I did this drive once. Well, my husband did and I was in the passenger seat so I got a real GOOD look at all the nothing. Late at night we actually stopped and got out because 1) we needed a stretch and 2) there was a full moon. We were far enough out that there weren’t any cornfields either, just undulating hills of sand sparsely covered with grass. It was beautiful in that light, and when we got back in I did some searches on the place.
You may not be surprised to find out that place used to be the bottom of an ocean. Doesn’t look like it’s changed much.
You may not be surprised to find out that place used to be the bottom of an ocean. Doesn’t look like it’s changed much.
Presumably it’s a bit less wet these days.
I mean… we don’t call it the Great Plains for nothing. Great used to mean big not necessarily good, for instance, Great Britain is the largest British isle.
Could also explain a lot of MAGA confusion.
Nice diss lol
I drive through it a few times a year, living in Denver but have family in Minnesota/Wisconsin. As crazy as it sounds, at least you have small towns and corn fields along I-80. There are some areas in Colorado (stretches of I-76, US-287 between Hugo and Kit Carson) where there’s just… Nothing. Like, you’d be surprised at how much more empty a corn field can be, and it totally does weird you out how far you are from a simple gas station, let alone a familiar McDonald’s (neither of those towns have that; I believe you’d have to go from Limon to Lamar to get from one McDonald’s to the next on that road, which is almost 2 hours)
Empty Colorado isn’t really flat though. It has rolling hills. Nebraska and Kansas are like Minecraft superflat worlds.
I lived in Utah for 6 years and loved driving through the empty parts of Utah and Colorado. Even Nevada sort of a little bit. I found it a far more stark, imposing, beautiful emptiness. Like “I could literally die if I broke down here…that’s so cool.” I remember one time driving out from SLC to Dinosaur, CO for the dispensary, and that stretch was just stunning. At one point, I had two dust devils spinning off to my right, and a rainstorm way off to my left over these lush, Shire-esque rolling green hills. I miss the west already.
Storytime?
Unfortunately, “I drove through Nebraska twice” is the whole story. It’s impossible to capture how Twilight Zone-esque it feels. It just never ends and never changes. There’s nothing. Corn and nothing. More corn and more nothing. I was recalling how a few months back, some of my dumbass nephews were running their mouths about going to a college football game IN NEBRASKA. AS VISITORS. And stirring up shit. And that makes me laugh, because I can’t comprehend the kind of sheer numbness necessary to live in that place. It just feels like 1 out of 5 serial killers should be burly, corn-fed, bored-as-shit Nebraskans, but I don’t believe that’s the case?
Kansas is very much the same, though it has some “hills” in one county. I cannot stress how oppressive it is to stand on a 3 story building and see the curve of the earth. The only thing I disliked more was the ocean.
