The late Yevgeny Yevtushenko had an unlikely affinity for cowboy poetry.

From North Dakota to Texas, the Great Plains is dotted with gems reserved for those willing to venture inward. For a classy trip through so-called “flyover country,” start with these 13 unforgettable features.

Elizabeth Ebert, the cowboy poetry queen.

Some of the trees on this list are avant-garde. They’re risky. Some are even heretical, like the fire-belching “Traffic Tree” in Berlin, or the Jack Daniels’ Barrel Tree in Tennessee.

They call it the “Rock 'n' Roll Capital of the World,” but in Cleveland, we listened to big band.

A knot of rebar sprouts from FDR’s forehead. William Henry Harrison looks like he just crawled home from a bar fight.

When we heard the Republican presidential nominee would be speaking in Reno, we jumped at what would likely be our last chance to experience first-hand this bizarre chapter in American history.

At just a hair over 1,200 square miles — 37 wide, 48 long and 14% underwater — Rhode Island is less than half the size of the county I grew up in in central Nebraska.

Warner—built like a refrigerator and sheathed in tattoos—is the proud owner of Wink’s Bar, a 200-square-foot diner in downtown Richmond, a tin-can rendezvous for townies and transients, gear heads and grad students, artists and accountants alike.

We needed more than the concept of a rich and textured Delaware — we needed the experience.

Author and playwright John Biguenet offers his thoughts on the narrative of destruction

That we should end up here — floating belly-up in a tailing pond of shame and self-pity outside Richmond, Va., one of our favorite cities in America — is, though unfortunate, probably fair.

A search for cattle leads to a stunning discovery.

We aren’t lost — we’re in West Virginia. We’re hauling a vintage travel trailer up a one-lane dirt road through a wrinkle of the Alleghenies called — what else — Devil’s Hollow.

But to drive through the semi-arid Sandhills on Highway 2 and find the Bessey Nursery and Nebraska National Forest is, in some ways, to stumble upon Area 51, a complex tucked deep in the wilderness, a testing ground hidden in the desert, out of sight, out of mind, out of context.

On our most recent tour through Dixieland — part of a yearlong road trip through the Lower 48 – we returned once again to what many have called the “Paris of the South,” a nod to Asheville’s extemporaneous street culture, that narcotic blend of high society and low, briefcases and bongo drums.

After more than 80 years, the Peabody Mallards are still marching on, with a young, earnest Duckmaster at their lead.

By the time I stumbled upon Prejudices, a selection of Mencken’s essays, at a used bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, I felt as if I’d known the cigar-chomping wise guy for years, even though I hadn’t read a word of his professional canon.

The old man’s whiskers tickled our travel trailer as we pulled into our campsite at Georgia’s Skidaway Island State Park, just 15 miles south of Savannah. It draped the live oaks and longleaf pines, the palm trees and the magnolias. It piled up in the road, like hay fallen from the truck.

Cowboy poetry was spawned on the trail drives north from Texas after the Civil War, as cowhands killed time around the campfire, telling stories to the rhythm of traditional ballads and the popular poetry of the time: Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow.