Offutt Air Force Base

The Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum sits along Interstate 80 near Ashland, between Omaha and Lincoln, southwest of Offutt Air Force Base. The collection started outdoors on the Offutt flight line in 1959, the brainchild of SAC commander Thomas Power and Colonel A. A. Arnhym. Curtis LeMay supported it from the start. The aircraft sat exposed to Nebraska weather for forty years. In 1998 the museum moved into a new $30 million indoor complex, 300,000 square feet across two climate-controlled hangars plus a glass atrium designed to display the SR-71A. The atrium shows a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird (tail number 61-7964) suspended below 525 glass panels. Around it: a Convair B-36J Peacemaker (one of only four surviving), a Convair B-58 Hustler, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet, a Boeing B-52B, a B-29 Superfortress, a Lockheed U-2C Dragon Lady, a Rockwell B-1A Lancer (one of only two surviving), a Boeing KC-97G tanker, a Martin RB-57E, a Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, an Avro Vulcan B.2 on loan from the RAF, and a North Vietnamese MiG-21. The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin is one of only two ever produced. Indoor exhibits also include a Mark 17 thermonuclear bomb, an actual Minuteman silo control panel, and Curtis LeMay artifacts. The aircraft at the heart of the Looking Glass Featured Story is here too: Boeing EC-135 Looking Glass, tail number 63-8049. Restored in 2024 to its 1961-1990 configuration; the airborne command post flew continuously for twenty-nine and a half years to mirror Offutt's underground command center. Visitors can walk inside. Outside the museum, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles stand vertical in front of the entrance. Most were live ordnance at some point.

Madison County, Iowa, once had nineteen covered bridges; six survive, and they became unexpectedly famous when Robert James Waller's 1992 novel "The Bridges of Madison County" — and the 1995 Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep film shot here — turned them into a symbol of fleeting romance. The bridges were covered, the local story goes, to protect the expensive flooring timbers from the weather (the roof was cheaper to replace than the deck). The Roseman Bridge (1883) is the one central to the story; the Cedar, Hogback, and others dot the rolling farmland around Winterset — which is also the birthplace of John Wayne. It's quintessential Iowa: covered bridges, county-seat squares, and corn to the horizon.

Each spring, between mid-February and early April, roughly 80% of the entire world population of sandhill cranes — about 600,000 to 1,000,000 birds — funnel through an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River in central Nebraska between Grand Island and North Platte. They feed in the surrounding cornfields during the day (fueling up for the migration north to nesting grounds in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia) and roost on the wide shallow sandbars of the Platte at night, where the open water protects them from coyotes and foxes. The peak roost density is typically near Kearney and Gibbon — the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary is the standard viewing location, with riverside blinds for dawn and dusk flights. Sandhill cranes are among the oldest bird species on Earth — fossil records go back 10 million years, essentially unchanged. They mate for life, can fly at 35 mph, and the spectacle of half a million calling at once is one of the great wildlife events of North America. Whooping cranes (only ~700 remaining in the wild) also pass through but in much smaller numbers.

The last large intact tallgrass prairie in North America — and one of the most thoroughly extinct ecosystems on the continent. Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 170 million acres from Indiana to Kansas. Less than 4% survives today; the rest was plowed into farmland by 1900. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, established 1996 in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas near Strong City, protects 10,894 acres — the largest single tract of unplowed tallgrass in the U.S. The Flint Hills survived because the rocky limestone subsoil made plowing impossible: the land could only be grazed, not cropped, so the original sod stayed in place. Bison were reintroduced in 2009 (a herd of about 100 today). Big bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, and switchgrass grow to 8 feet tall by late summer. The Spring Hill / Z Bar Ranch headquarters is preserved as a working ranch with an 1881 limestone barn and house. The preserve sits at the convergence point where a co-managed NPS/Nature Conservancy/private-ranch model has kept the land intact.