49. Nebraska

Oh, Nebraska.

Story time! Before I went on my trip to the Southwest earlier this year to visit my 50th state, I had a pit in my stomach when I recounted when I had gone to all the other states. “Huh, I don’t seem to remember specifically when I had gone to Nebraska.” “No, I must have gone”, I thought, “If you make a straight line from St. Louis to Polebridge it goes through pretty much the entirety of the state”. However, on my most recent trip to Polebridge from Missouri, I did not go through the state at all. The fastest route takes you up I-29 and at closest takes you literally hundreds of feet through the border but never actually goes through.

I-29 is highlighted above

I began to panic. Nebraska can’t be my 50th state; what kind of ending would that be? Maybe I had never actually gone through because I had always assumed I had been, and so we never rerouted to go through. I think I remember one of those drives there being construction and we needed to take a detour through Omaha, but I can’t be so certain.

So to make 100% sure Nebraska was not my last state, I took my mom and I on a 2 hour detour that went through the entirety of the state. And I must say, thank god it wasn’t my real finale.

The stereotypes are not so far off. Almost the entire state is farmland, but not even like cool varied farmland. It’s just back and forth between massive empty land of nothing but corn and soybean crops and cattle lots. And most of the state stinks to high heaven because of those! We drove 8 hours through the state and saw hardly anything worth mentioning.

And to make matters even worse, right after we left the state, my mom forgot her phone at a Casey’s in Ogallala. We needed to figure something else out because no way were we driving 2 hours to go back to Nebraska!

However, the woman who worked there was a rockstar and mailed the phone back to us at another stop on our trip. And I have to admit, the fact that someone would go out of their way to do that is pretty special. So thank you very much! You made Nebraska escape last place!