Feature story on Adventure Cycling's website: Road to Nowhere (Hwy 83)
https://www.adventurecycling.org/blog/road-to-nowhere/
Take-aways: Blistering weather, monotonous food and landscape, shelled out small towns, huge trucks blaring their horns, orders by LEOs to not ride in the traffic lanes, kitschy/cheesy roadside attractions, indistinguishable & forgettable motels, opinionated & argumentative natives.
The tour was on the author's bucket list.
Interesting. My experiences:
- Weather; I started in July in Abilene and it was hot in TX. It wasn't particularly hot in my April/December cycling. If you were going to ride all in one go, I'd recommend ~April or perhaps September/October. I had more tailwinds than headwinds.
- Monotonous food and landscape; like deserts, the Great Plains aren't for everyone; personally I like both plains and desert landscapes.
- Shelled out small towns; after Abilene (~120,000 people) there aren't larger towns further north. These small towns are somewhat variable. In some cases I suspect their peak population was ~1910s (before as many moved from the farms), but I also didn't have experience the writer had of 50+ miles between water - so not sure if he missed some of the small places along the way.
- Huge trucks blaring horns, LEO warning not to ride in traffic lanes; On average there were moderately wide shoulders. These were often chip seal and occasionally rough, but I was riding on the shoulders most all the times. I didn't experience much in the way of trucks blaring horns on my ride.
- Roadside attractions; sometimes just the nature of these smaller places. For example, I enjoyed taking time off to go to the ND State Fair.
- Opinionated & argumentative natives; I didn't find people much different than anywhere else