As of the beginning of last month, I had just three states left to visit to lay claim to having set foot in all 50 of our United States. Then we visited Nebraska. Now I have just two remaining. Kansas and Oklahoma, if you must know.
It is not enough for me to cross a state's border, get out of the car and declare myself having crossed one more state off the list. No!!! For me, I have to have done something or visited somewhere significant in my time there to truly claim that I have been there. This is sometimes difficult, especially when we get down to Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma on the "to visit" list. Not dissing those states exactly, but it's not like we are heading to New York or Los Angeles or somewhere like that.
Finding something meaningful to do becomes even more difficult when we aren't really visiting the state that we try to cross off the list, which is what happened with Nebraska. If we wanted to visit Nebraska to just get credit for having spent time in Nebraska, we probably would have flown to Omaha, downed a steak dinner and a Reuben sandwich (it was invented there) for lunch the next day and gone home. But we weren't visiting Nebraska; our trip last month was to South Dakota, but our itinerary would take us to within 45 miles of the northwest Nebraska border.
Come on...we had to make it to Nebraska. All we had to do was find something significant in the northwest corner of the state. And grabbing lunch at Runza would not count.
We settled on Carhenge. Yes, Carhenge.
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| The best car (in my opinion) at Carhenge. The 1954 or 1956 Cadillac used as a lintel atop two Ford wagons. |
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| And second best...the 1950 Chrysler DeSoto. |
There is something uniquely American about building a replica of Stonehenge out of cars in the middle of the United States. I know that makes relatively little sense but I don't think you could really get away with doing something this simultaneously pointless and awesome at the same time in any other country in the world. And the central part of our country seems to be peppered with these types of things. World's largest ball of twine. The Blue Whale of Catoosa. World's largest pistachio (there are a lot of "world's largest" out there...). Muffler men. Cadillac Ranch. They and many others like them of varying quality and interest are all part of the American road trip experience. Or something like that. When they work, they are amazing.
Carhenge is the brainchild of Jim Reinders, an engineer from Alliance, Nebraska who spent seven years of his life working in England. When he returned home, somehow he decided he needed to create what he referred to as "Stonehenge West" and his medium of choice happened to be cars.
Apparently Jim had a lot of cars lying around and I guess it's way easier to move cars to a field in rural Nebraska than it is to move giant slabs of stone. He started with 25 cars and managed to get all of them into place in a six-day long family reunion over the summer solstice in 1987. Can you imagine showing up to a weeklong gathering with family and finding out that someone's got an idea that you are going to be standing cars in the ground and placing others on top of them in an effort to personalize your cousin Jim's field? That must have been a fun week.
Keep in mind here that it's not just putting cars in place as is. All the windows are covered with sheet steel (I'm assuming it's steel...also assuming they were covered for safety reasons) and then the whole things are painted grey to match the actual stone circle on Salisbury Plain. I guess those things are a fairly light lift compared to the actual moving of the cars.
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| Random American cars topped by a 1975 Gremlin (left) and 1962 Plymouth Valiant (right). |
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| 1960 Ford Galaxie (left) and 1961 Cadillac DeVille (right) emerging from the ground. |
Now, if you know anything about me and cars, you'll know I'm not much of a cars guy. But I do have a love for specific models and a certain era of automobile design from the 1950s to the 1970s. And Carhenge has a number of these. How Jim Reimers decided the best use of a 1950 Chrysler DeSoto or a mid-50s Cadillac was to blow out the windows, paint them solid grey and make them part of his backyard sculpture is beyond me. Of course, I don't have the benefit of knowing the condition of these vehicles before he moved them to his field and started stacking them on top of each other.
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| Check out the tail fins on the 1957 Plymouth (I believe) on the right. Damn those things are gorgeous. |
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| How I know what I know about cars at Carhenge. |
It may seem crazy to you that I drove (...or more accurately sat in the passenger seat...I drove back) 2-1/2 hours to get to a field with a bunch of cars altered and painted and stuck in the ground in a circle. It is for sure a serious drive from Rapid City, but it got me a new state and it's free. I can legitimately claim I've now visited Nebraska and I didn't spend that much to get there. Just $4.50 or whatever it was that weekend per gallon of gas.
It also works. Somehow it makes sense. It's well enough done and doesn't look sloppy. I'd debate the precision of its similarity to the actual Stonehenge but I suppose precision is not really the point here. It really doesn't possess any of the presence or mystery of Stonehenge either, but you can at least walk around and between the henge and touch the cars, all of which you can't do at the real thing. It's all pretty much stupid, I know. But it's completely middle American and I love it.
The gift shop is also awesome. In addition to the map of the place identifying all the cars, we will have a brand new Carhenge Christmas tree ornament hanging from a branch on our fake Christmas tree this December. How cool is that?
Lest you think a visit to Carhenge stops at the henge of cars, you'd be wrong. Seems Jim had a few more ideas up his sleeve for other ways to make cars into art and he's located these north of the circle in their own separate area of the property. There are a couple of time capsules up in that area along with a group of four cars called the "Fourd Seasons". There's also a "car"-nestoga wagon which perhaps obviously is a car modified to resemble a Conestoga wagon and a graffiti-tagged "auto"-graph car which adds color to the place.
None of these additions (there are also others not by Jim) has the impact or the scale or the inspiration of the original idea. None of them bests Carhenge.
Thus mostly ended our trip to Nebraska. Mostly. We got hungry and you know we just couldn't get out of the state without hitting a Runza.
What's a Runza, you might ask? Well, it's a ground beef and cabbage sandwich that's supplemented with other ingredients depending on what variety you decide upon. I went with the southwest, which I'm not sure was the correct call. The sandwich was good but not great but I'd give it another shot if I ever found myself in rural Nebraska again. I'd probably pass on the frings (fries and onion rings combo) but the service in the Chadron, NE restaurant was fantastic. Best fast food service experience of my life. Jackson represented Nebraskans very well.
Carhenge and Runza. That's my Nebraska experience. I'd call it good enough.
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