Next up in “Who knew?!” is Nebraska, which had both perfect weather and glorious scenery. My mom was born in Nebraska, in Kearney, which started as a military fort to protect settlers traveling west in the late 1840s. (Oregon Trail anyone?)
Good Samaritan Hospital, where my mom was born. Folks in Kearney realized they needed a hospital in 1919 due to the influenza epidemic during WWI. They asked the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration to run the place. This is Christ the King Chapel, completed in 1950, the second addition to the original hospital. There’s been several modern additions since then, and the hospital is now the area’s high-level trauma center and one of highest-quality cardiac centers in the nation.
Downtown Kearney. (Kearney is pronounced CAR-nee.) The city was officially incorporated in 1873.
Kearney is also where my parents got married, at Kearney’s Seventh-day Adventist church, nearly 50 years ago. (Forty-seven years to be exact.)
If you take a nice four-hour drive northwest to Alliance, you can visit Carhenge, “Nebraska’s answer to Stonehenge,” which was recently made a near-household name by VP candidate Tim Walz. The brainchild of a man named Jim Reinders, Carhenge is a memorial to his father and sits on the land that used to be his father’s farm. Reinders lived in England and studied Stonehenge, so Carhenge has the same proportions and includes key “stones” like the heel stone, the slaughter stone, and two station stones. The Reinder family dedicated Carhenge upon its completion in 1987 (on the summer solstice of course). Carhenge is made of 39 vehicles ranging from a 1950 DeSoto to a 1975 Ford Country Squire. A 1961 Cadillac DeVille gets the honor of being the heel stone, and there’s even a 1951 Willys Jeep.
There’s not a lot of food on the drive from Kearney to Alliance. I don’t think there was a Subway even, which felt unusual for a road trip. (There’s a Subway in Alliance, and several in Kearney, but not so much in between.) So getting back to the Denver airport felt extremely fancy. I indulged at the plant-forward Root Down for a tofu scramble lunch and followed up with a vegan Portland Cream from Voodoo Doughnut.

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