Hastings

We came to Hastings on a whim because Lia read somewhere that Kool-Aid was invented here, in a house on the edge of downtown by a man named Edwin Perkins who was trying to figure out how to ship a fizzy soda concentrate called Fruit Smack without the glass bottles breaking. That absurd little fact turned into a genuinely charming afternoon. Hastings is a quiet county seat of about twenty-five thousand people in south-central Nebraska, its downtown a tidy grid of early-twentieth-century brick buildings that never got the strip-mall treatment, and it wears its one claim to pop-culture fame with real affection rather than kitsch.

The Kool-Aid Days museum and mural

Every August the town throws Kool-Aid Days, closing off streets for a festival built entirely around a powdered drink mix, and the rest of the year you can visit a small but sincere museum exhibit inside the Hastings Museum that walks through Perkins’s kitchen-table invention and the decades of mascot redesigns that followed. Downtown, a massive mural on the side of a building depicts the Kool-Aid Man mid-burst through a brick wall, which made Lia laugh so hard she had to sit down on the curb. It’s a small, strange piece of Americana that the town has fully embraced rather than shrugged off.

The Hastings Museum and its planetarium

The Hastings Museum itself is bigger and better than a town this size has any right to host, with a full planetarium, a wildlife hall, and rotating exhibits that pull in families from three counties around. We spent a rainy hour under the dome watching a show about the Nebraska night sky, then wandered the natural history galleries where taxidermied bison and cranes stand in for the wildlife just outside town. Afterward we found a diner on Second Street serving runzas — a Nebraska specific bread pocket stuffed with beef and cabbage — and I understood immediately why locals get defensive about them.

Getting There

Hastings has a small municipal airport with no regular commercial service, so most visitors fly into Lincoln (LNK) or Omaha (OMA) and drive southwest, about ninety minutes from Lincoln or just under three hours from Omaha via I-80 and US-281. A car is necessary for getting around; downtown is walkable once you’ve parked, but nothing outside it is reachable on foot.