There are many ways to get from where we live near Denver to where we have a lot of family in Sioux Falls, SD. In general, all of those options include some sort of traversal of Nebraska — and I think in the past 6 years we’ve tried ‘em all.
Six years… Six years is the longest the family and I have ever lived in one house!
The last few trips, we’ve been experimenting with taking Highway 83 north from North Platte, NE up to Murdo, SD then jumping on I-90 to finish the trip to Sioux Falls. This past week we went that route both to and from.
There’s something about driving across the rolling hills, looking at the scrub (this ain’t farm land). Checking out the small towns, the reservation homes on the highway. It… I dunno… grounds you, I guess is the best way to put it. There’s a lot of time for a lot of thinking and reflection.
A lack of traffic is a plus too.
I particularly like the brief drive through Valentine. Somehow, I always get the feeling that we’ll live there in the future. I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t know why I’d think that. But I always want to stop and grab a paper — check out the real-estate market and look at the jobs. Destiny? Over-active imagination? Boredom? Not sure. But something there has an appeal.
At any rate, all “odd” musings aside, that route certainly beats the crap out of driving up I-29 on the west side of Iowa. 
I’ll go that way if it look like snow… but otherwise, I’d rather take a bullet than drive that stretch.
Going up 81 isn’t a terrible option, but it involves slowing down through an awful lot of little towns. Each town tends to have two bars and one elevator and a dying downtown. Depressing, really. The 83 route just doesn’t have that many towns to deal with.