The garage man half edges away from you. “Fr’m here t’ Denver is about thutty-five hours’ straight travelin’. You gutta slow down t’ eight miles through towns and y’ can’t go over twenty miles an hour nowheres!”
When you manage to get a little breath into your collapsed lungs you say dazedly, “But we’re going over the ‘fast dragged’ road.”
“Road’s fast enough! But the law’ll have you if you drive over it faster’n twenty miles an hour.”
If you can find the joke in all of this, you have a more humorous mental equipment and a sweeter disposition than we had.
A Straight, Wide Road; Not Even a Shack in Sight—and a Speed Limit of Twenty Miles an Hour
Across Nebraska from the last good hotel in Omaha to the first comfortable one in Denver or Cheyenne is over five hundred miles. At the prescribed “speed” of about seventeen miles an hour average, it means literally a pleasant little run of between thirty and forty hours along a road dead level, wide, straight, and where often as far as the eye can see, there is not even a shack in the dimmest distance, and the only settlers to be seen are prairie dogs.
If between Omaha and Cheyenne there were three or four attractive clean little places to stop, or if the Nebraska speed laws were abolished or disregarded and it didn’t rain, you could motor to the heart of the Rocky Mountains with the utmost ease and comfort.
In May, 1915, the road by way of Sterling to Denver was impassable; all automobiles were bogged between Big Spring and Julesburg, so on the advice of car owners that we met, we went by way of Chappell to Cheyenne. It is quite possible, of course, that we blindly passed comfortable stopping-places, but to us that whole vast distance from Omaha to Cheyenne was one to be crossed with as little stop-over as possible. Aside from questions of accommodations and speed laws, the interminable distance was in itself an unforgettably wonderful experience. It gave us an impression of the lavish immensity of our own country as nothing else could. Think of driving on and on and on and yet the scene scarcely changing, the flat road stretching as endlessly in front of you as behind. The low yellow sand banks and flat sand islands scarcely vary on the Platte, which might as well be called the Flat, River. The road does gradually rise several thousand feet but the distance is so immense your engine does not perceive a grade. Once in a while you pass great herds of cattle fenced in vast enclosures and every now and then you come to a group of nesters’ shanties, scattered over the gray-green plain as though some giant child had dropped its blocks, or as though some Titans, playing dominoes, had left a few lying on the table.
At greater intervals you come to towns and you drive between two closely fitted rows of oddly assorted domino-shaped stores and houses, and then on out upon the great flat table again. For scores and scores of miles the scene is unvarying. On and on you go over that endless road until at last far, far on the gray horizon you catch the first faint glint of the white-peaked Rocky Mountains.