Omaha

Lia and I almost skipped Omaha. It was a dot on the map between two longer drives, the kind of place you refuel and forget. Then we walked into the Old Market at dusk, boots catching on cobblestones worn smooth by a century of wagon wheels, and the whole idea of a quick stop dissolved. String lights swung between old brick warehouses. A busker was murdering a Springsteen song and nobody minded. Lia squeezed my arm and said, “We’re not leaving tonight, are we.” We weren’t.

The Old Market After Dark

The Old Market is Omaha’s stubborn heart, a district of 19th-century produce warehouses that the city refused to bulldoze. We spent our first evening just wandering it, ducking into a bookshop that sprawled across several crooked floors, then into a tiny bar where the bartender poured us something local and talked cattle prices for twenty minutes. The buildings still wear their old painted signs, faded to ghosts. What I loved was the lack of performance here. Nobody was selling us a version of the Midwest. It simply was itself, brick and iron and the smell of rain on old stone.

A Desert, a Jungle, and a Frozen Sea

I am generally suspicious of zoos, but Henry Doorly changed my mind for an afternoon. It is genuinely one of the great ones. We stepped into the Desert Dome, the largest indoor desert in the world under an enormous geodesic glass roof, and the dry heat hit us like Sonora itself. Below it, the Kingdoms of the Night, a pitch-black world of bats and blind cave fish. Then the Lied Jungle, humid and loud with birds, where Lia stood a long while under a fake-but-convincing waterfall. We emerged blinking into Nebraska sunlight, a little disoriented, having crossed three climates before lunch.

The Steak Question, Settled

You cannot come to Omaha and dodge the steak. This is beef country, the old stockyards city, and the locals take it personally. We went to an old-school chophouse with red leather booths and waiters who’d clearly worked there since the Nixon administration. Lia, who usually orders fish out of principle, ordered a ribeye and went quiet in the reverent way she does when food is very good. Mine came thick, charred, faintly smoky, the kind of steak that needs no sauce and gets none. Afterward we walked it off along the riverfront, the Missouri moving slow and vast in the dark, Iowa glittering on the far bank.

Getting There

Omaha’s Eppley Airfield sits just minutes northeast of downtown, with direct flights from most major U.S. hubs, and a taxi to the Old Market takes barely fifteen minutes. If you’re driving, the city straddles Interstate 80, the great transcontinental artery, so it slots naturally into any cross-country road trip. We came in off the highway, but I’d recommend timing your arrival for late afternoon so the Old Market’s lamps are just flickering on as you find your feet. Everything downtown is walkable once you’re there, and the riverfront trails link the Old Market to the pedestrian bridge over to Iowa if you fancy strolling into another state before dinner.