This All-American Road travels from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee and clips the northwestern corner of Alabama along the way. Travel back in time with a trip on the 444 mile long Natchez Trace Parkway. Relax, take your time, and enjoy the drive. This is a pleasant, leisurely drive through beautiful country with a maximum speed limit of 50mph. It’s not a road you can drive in a day or even a week if you wish to see it all. This scenic drive roughly follows and commemorates the historic Old Natchez Trace and is jam-packed with over 10,000 years of history! Along the way, you can hike preserved sections of the Old Trace, read historical markers telling the stories of the people back in the day, see historical buildings, Indian ceremonial, and burial mounds, breathtaking scenic overlooks there are rivers, lakes, swamps, picnic areas, hiking trails, and campgrounds. There are seven segments of the Old Trace that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Roosevelt signed the Natchez Trace Parkway into law on May 18, 1938, establishing it as a unit of the National Park System, and officially protecting this historically significant highway of the Old Southwest. The Parkway was a long time coming it officially opened in 2005 after being under construction and planning for 67 years! President Franklin D. Travel back in time with a trip on the 444-mile long Natchez Trace Parkway. The Nebraska Sandhills is a place of wide-open spaces where undulating windswept dunes have been stabilized by a sea of prairie grass that only has a fragile hold on the land, and where cowboy hats and cowboy boots are a way of life and not just a fashion statement. Being in the Central Flyway for migratory birds, it’s teeming with wildlife, and you can’t forget the Spring Migration of the Sandhill Cranes. It’s home to the completely hand-planted Nebraska National Forest, the Loup River, abundant wetlands created by the Ogallala Aquifer, and brilliant night skies. This 272-mile long National Byway starts in Grand Island and ends in Alliance, passing through the middle of an area of world-class natural wonders. Located in the north-central section of Nebraska, the Sandhills cover a little more than a quarter of the state. Nebraska Highway 2, AKA Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway, is one such place. There are very few places left in America that are so pristine that they have been virtually untouched by man. They were performing courtship behavior and eventually mated right in front of the blind! A pair of Canada Geese had swum away from the group. But, there were so many more exciting birds to observe I didn't comprehend the rarity of the moment until it was almost too late. What happened next, I never would have expected in a million years! Of course, it had been going on for a while.

That alone was enough for any nature lover to consider the day a success! I might add that this was all happening simultaneously and was not the accumulated sights of many hours of observation. In addition, there were at least a dozen Northern Shovelers swimming about while turtles sunned themselves on a log nearby. A Great Blue Heron flew across my path and perched in a tree at the edge of the pond, grooming himself, while a Great Egret posed atop a bush over the water doing the same. The day I visited, the nesting Canada Geese entertained me on the island in the center of the pond. They have an excellent photography blind on a pond at the end of a short trail. But then I realized the noise that I considered a negative camouflaged the people on the sanctuary trail and is most likely the secret sauce for what makes Heron Haven so great. At first, I was disappointed that I did not hear the sounds of birds singing since heavy traffic and the sound of children screaming from the ball fields down the road drowned them out.

This small urban wetland sanctuary is located right in the middle of the city of Omaha, Nebraska. After seeing many posts about the fantastic wildlife encounters at Heron Haven Nature Center, I decided to visit.

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