Hands down, the best budget hotel chain out there is La Quinta. For anywhere from 75-125 bucks, La Quinta offers an immaculate, very comfortable King or 2 Queen room with all the basic amenities as well as a mediocre gym and solid breakfast buffet. After staying at an array of hotels from literally the nastiest motel to 5-star resorts (the latter of which was only possible due to some very fortunate connections within the hotel industry), La Quinta offers the best bang for you buck at an average of 100/night which can turn into 25 per person if, say, you are traveling with four people. At that rate you could be relatively more frugal by strictly staying at La Quintas around the country than camping at a quality campground which will often run you around 50 per night excluding bathroom, shower, A/C (very important) a gym to get ripped and burn off those daily roadtrip fast food stops, and a quality sleep, let alone food. In the morning, we headed back across the border into Nebraska and spent the early part of the day in Omaha. The thing is, there's literally nothing to do in Omaha and I wonder to this day why my idol Warren Buffet has lived his entire life there . In reality his reasoning is quite clear because the man leads a very simple life outside of the 23 hours per day he spends investing, which consists of drinking disgusting amounts of Cherry Coke and going to his favorite, extremely mediocre restaurant--Gorat's Steakhouse. After reading the TripAdvisor reviews of Gorat's (2 star average) we made the tough decision to avoid the Oracle's fine dining stop and instead choose a very cool brewery/restaurant called Upstream Brewing Company. I was excited to dine in Omaha because it is known to have the best steak in the country. After eating, I realized that this claim is somewhat fallacious, and really, having the best steak is less defined by the region than it is by the quality of the restaurant and expertise of the chef. Consider this my sagely insight of the day. As another aside, I realized that one's conception of a city is all relative, for what we think of as typical cities on the East Coast such as Boston and New York City have absolutely no commonalities with the cities of the Heartland and Great Plains other than containing buildings. Omaha's cityscape was pleasant enough, yet the environment felt barren and bereft of feeling. The long streets and perfect-grid composition of the city seemed infinitely larger than its true size, and I was left feeling somewhat spooked at the complete lack of street life/sound of humans on that sunny morning. Long story short, by the conclusion of lunch, we were ready to bounce from Mr. Buffet's ghost town. But first, here is some visual evidence to complement my description of Omaha's "ehhh" status, plus a scandalous innuendo-see what "comes" to mind:
Our drive from Omaha to Rapid City, South Dakota, a cool little town with a Western-feel on the cusp of the Black Hills and the western end of the colloquial "Great Plains." This drive was no cakewalk:
Our direct mileage was about 575 miles or 8.5 hours and obviously we would deviate from that straight-line path. This area of the Great Plains surrounding interstates 29 North and 90 West is filled with fascinating points of interest which far outnumber the bland farmlands and mind-numbing attractions of the Midwest (refer to 10 foot rotating ear of corn sculpture from previous post). We had planned to drive straight up I-29 to the intersection with I-90 West at Sioux Falls, SD before stopping. This did not happen. We made it up to Sioux City, IA (ranked # 14 on 40th drunkest citiest in the US and unranked in any and all other categories of interest)
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