A bluff outside Fort Collins, Colorado, pointing the way to Nebraska.

Add the Cornhusker state to all the places in America that straight-as-an-arrow Interstate 80 can make look either (1) monotonous or (2) really monotonous. Because I’ve seen the state before from I-80. In the summertime. In sweltering I-need-a-shower-now humidity. All while passing through what appeared to be (thanks to I-80) a flat, uninhabited landscape that hardly ever changed.

Now I’m thinking: What a disservice.

Because there’s another Nebraska that’s much more interesting — but to see it you have to get off the interstate and travel  instead along what the author William Least Heat Moon called “blue highways” (for the color of the lines on a map that represent either backroads or second-string truck routes).

Like the old Lincoln Highway (Highway 30) that runs east and west through Nebraska, roughly paralleling I-80. The big difference being: It doesn’t eliminate all of the people and small towns along the way. It embraces them. Traveling on Highway 30 by motorcycle this week was really a pleasant experience.

Three reasons why:

One: The cornfields next to it aren’t some blurry abstraction a hundred yards away. On the Lincoln, they’re five yards away, and you smell them. If you pull over you can even touch them. You see the farmers working in their fields. You hear their machinery. The margins of the road are teeming with wildlife. The other morning I rode past a large flock of wild turkeys.

Two: Every 10 miles or so, a little farm town appears, each with a grain terminal that borders the railroad tracks. These towns are far too modest to stop you with a traffic light. But as you slow down a bit — say from 60 to 30 — you get a chance to look them over. Some have handsome trees that arch over the highway. Some have a dusty look reminiscent of “The Last Picture Show,” with small businesses struggling to survive. All along Highway 30  former shops lie shuttered, their buildings gone to seed. But you can easily imagine how vibrant the little towns must have been before I-80 drained away their customers.

Three: The Union Pacific railroad runs parallel to the Lincoln and only about a road width away. Sometimes you can catch one of the long freight trains traveling in the same direction as you are and about the same speed. For a few moments the locomotive and you travel side by side and you can see the engineer. And maybe he sees that you’re riding long-distance on a motorcycle (as perhaps he did himself one time) and you can make him blow his train whistle by giving him a friendly wave. And that’s really fun.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.