Five-Day Getaway

When you live in a small city in the middle of a vast country, and have limited time and money, planning a short vacation that offers a change of scenery and interesting activities can be a challenge. (In my family, I'm the travel agent. My husband is going, but prefers not to get involved in the planning.)

My first idea was Memphis, Tennessee. We haven't been there before, and we both thought it would be fun to visit Graceland. We only have 4-1/2 days, so we didn't want to spend a lot of it en route. I have booked many itineraries through Memphis because the airport is pleasant and easy to navigate, and flights between there and Omaha were quick and on-time.

But when I looked for flights this time, I found that we couldn't fly directly to Memphis. Our airports in Lincoln and Omaha have lost so many itineraries to cutbacks in service that the only cities we can fly to nonstop from Lincoln are Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago and Denver. The planes are tiny, too.

So I looked for interesting places within driving distance. If you're not from the west, it can be hard to imagine the distances that are part of our personal landscapes. We would love to explore the Nebraska sandhills, but the nearest available lodging is a 7-hour drive from here. From there, we would do a lot more driving to get to some of the areas we want to visit. We used to have public flights from Lincoln to western Nebraska, too.

Kansas City and Des Moines are easy to reach, they're great cities and we'll visit again, but we want to go someplace we haven't been to before.

I chose Hannibal, Missouri as our destination.