USA Guide
The Great Plains
Scenic Hwy-2
Scenic Hwy-2 meanders and dips for over 330 miles from I-80 to South Dakota's Black Hills. It passes through the Sandhills – a martian landscape carpeted with short-grass prairie and softened by delicate wild flowers and shiny ponds. Apart from a few farmsteads, grain silos, and tiny churches, all you're likely to see on the open road are lazing cattle, a few sluggish rivers, and the occasional mile-and-a-quarter-long freight train weaving its way through the hills. It's a long, desolate, yet strangely beautiful drive.
The road dawdles for miles through scattered villages before drifting into Alliance, which pulls in over fifty thousand visitors per year for its one big attraction. Carhenge, two and a half miles north on State Hwy-87 (dawn to dusk; free; www.carhenge.com), is a rough copy of Stonehenge – but made with old cars rather than stone. Erected in a cornfield during a family reunion in 1987, this intriguing collection of Chevys, Cadillacs, and Plymouths, painted a brooding battleship grey and tilted at unusual angles, has to be the best picnic site in America's heartland. To some it's an ingenious piece of Pop Art; others view it as great black humor, or an appalling eyesore. The Nebraska Department of Roads rapidly declared it a junkyard, and ordered the city of Alliance to remove it, forcing locals to form Friends of Carhenge, whose work seems to have secured the monument's future.
There is no reason to linger in Alliance, but if you arrive late, try the Days Inn, 117 Cody Ave, just off Third Street ( 
308/762-8000; Price: $51-75). As food options are limited, its not a bad idea to bring a sack lunch from the big city on your trek across the Sandhills.