ALLIANCE, Neb.—Tim Shelmadine isn’t sure he’s ready for the hordes of visitors expected to descend on his little print shop, here in the wilds of the Nebraska Panhandle.
“To be honest with you, I’ve got to get up to speed,” Mr. Shelmadine said one day last month as he stood over a printing machine, frantically stamping Nebraska-themed sweatshirts. The Shelmadine Print Shop, which operates in a converted opera house, is one of 70 stops on a state tourism program that has stoked a pandemic-fueled competitive fervor among Nebraskans.
Travelers come by car, truck and RV, armed with “Nebraska Passport” books they get stamped at stops scattered across the state’s 77,000 square miles—ranging from “One of the World’s Largest Covered Porch Swings” to a church made from baled straw. “It’s basically a tourism scavenger hunt,” said Becci Thomas, director of the Knight Museum and Sandhills Center in Alliance, a city of about 8,200.
No, dammit, my 100 page passport is already full to the brim with country stamps. Its costs proper money to replace. Why would you do this?
lmao sounds like a dumb boomers idea of a good time
I went there ~25 years go. We were the only ones