Road Trip Baby!!!!!!!!!!! Kansas City-Mt Rushmore-Denver

[Chris Jeffers]

ok peeps so planning a trip for late june and need help. have alway drove straight accross i-70 to colorado, but now going there via mt rushmore, so looking for cool things to do and see on my way, thanks for the help
Chris

[Southwest Dave]

Hello and welcome to the RTA forums !

What would you consider cool ? How long are you going for ? Is it a one way trip or return ?

I would look around the forums and road trip planning pages and get some dots on the map, give us a little more info and then we can make some meaningful suggestions and help fill in the blanks.

Enjoy the planning !

[Midwest Michael]

Welcome to the RTA Forum!

Well, a couple real obvious stops could be the Corn Palace, the Badlands, and Wall Drug.

However, there's certainly a lot more possibilities, but we'd need to know a lot more about the kind of time you have available, and what things you'd like to see. In the meantime, there are a lot of resources on this site to help you find more ideas, you just have to look around a little bit.

[Foy]

............visit the Nebraska Sandhills.

Hello Chris,

Even if your trip plans do not allow for extra time to be spent enroute, I'd route through the Sandhills just for the unique and splendid scenery.

From KC, my route would take me along the I-29/NE-2 corridor to Lincoln, I-80 west for around 90 miles to the 300 milepost, NE-11 north for a few miles to Cairo and NE-2 (you avoid some suburban traffic in Grand Island that way). I'd then run northwest on NE-2 (named the Sandhills Scenic Journey, 2 lanes, 70 mph speed limits most of the way, and many small railroad towns requiring a brief slow-down to 55 or 45) all the way across the Sandhills to Alliance, just off of the western edge of the hills. Broken Bow is a particularly nice little town and would make a good overnight stop. From Alliance I'd go up US 385 to Chadron if I were interested in the Museum of the Fur Trade or the Sandoz High Plains Center at Chadron State College. A truly spectacular option would be to remain on NE-2/71 north of Alliance, through Hemingford to Crawford and Fort Robinson State Park. Last summer I enjoyed that route and departed Crawford at around 5:30am on a dead-silent July morning. I took NE -2/71 north into South Dakota, where I branched northwest on SD 471 (a gravel road) to Edgemont. A few miles south of Edgemont lies Igloo, the location of a major munitions assembly plant during WWII. One could connect to Mt Rushmore from Edgemont OR by remaining on 71, I suppose. I headed west from Edgemont bound for I-90 near Gillette, WY, so never explored the Black Hills.

There's a +50 mile rails to trails cycling path with its southern terminus at or near Edgemont, too, and that's on my list of rail-trails to ride one of these days.

Foy