Two-Lane Tidbits
A grab bag of roadside moments, small-town surprises, and all the little bits that make the backroads worth wandering.
Where does one go to find the perfect combination of ghost town and old service station (we realize it’s an odd and very Jen-specific combo)? The answer – Lake Valley, New Mexico. On our list for quite some time, a holiday trip to Southern NM finally got us to Lake Valley. Established as a mining…
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Sitting atop La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia (the Hill of Piety and Misery) in San Luis, CO, the oldest town in Colorado, is the Shrine of the Stations of the Cross. Fifteen bronze statues created by local artist Huberto Maestas depicting the Stations of the Cross, the final hours of Jesus’…
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Near Cloudcroft, NM is the Mexican Canyon Trestle, a portion of the former Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain Railway. Constructed in 1899 and in use until 1947, it stands 52 over the valley floor, runs 323 feet in length, and was one of 58 trestles built on a 32-mile track from Alamogordo to numerous timber areas…
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Everyone is familiar with Smokey Bear and his important message about preventing wildfires, but did you know that Smokey Bear was a real bear? The longest-running public service announcement advertising campaign in American history, Smokey first appeared in 1944. The famous “Remember…only YOU can prevent forest fires” slogan was created in 1947 and used until…
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Built in 1911, the Lodgepole Opera House in Lodgepole, NE was constructed as a garage on the first level and an opera house on the upper floor. Sitting along the route of the Lincoln Highway, it was built at a time when opera houses were springing up across Nebraska, their popularity a result of rural…
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The former State Line Truck Stop and Cafe sits along the Lincoln Highway straddling the Nebraska-Wyoming border just outside the town of Pine Bluffs, WY. Closed and abandoned since the early 1990s, this one has been on our bucket list for quite some time. It was one of the most prominent stations along the 1913…
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When it opened in 1918, the Wheat Growers Hotel in Kimball, NE was said to be “the most glamorous hotel between Omaha and Denver”. Just a few blocks off the Lincoln Highway, future president Eisenhower stayed at the hotel in 1919 while traveling across the country on the Lincoln Highway with the Motor Transport Corps…
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Panorama Point, the highest point in Nebraska at 5,424 feet above sea level, is a short drive off of the Lincoln Highway. Located on private property in the middle of a bison ranch, visitors are only permitted to drive in to the site (no hiking, because no one wants a close encounter with a bison).…
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A tiny town with just one paved road, Yampa, CO, which lies between Steamboat Springs and Vail, is home to Crossan’s M&A Market. The heart of town for decades, it opened in 1903 in anticipation of the coming railroad and was the community general store until its closure in 1964. After its closure, it sat…
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Cañon City, CO is home to more than the famous Royal Gorge Bridge, it’s also home to the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. Despite digging we can’t quite get a straight story, but as we once heard, way back in 1868 (before Colorado was a state), Cañon City had the choice of the state prison or…
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