I don’t want to go there again, but don’t overlook the bad, bad Badlands of South Dakota. You’re crossing a broad, flat stretch of open territory, and suddenly this raw, jagged, primitive-looking silhouette rises up on the horizon. Pretty soon you’re encompassed by a vast otherworldly landscape that was once underwater. It looks dire in every direction. My son the photographer thought it was magnificent, but to me it was more like bad-dream country.
Also go ahead and follow the signs to Wall Drug. It’s worth a visit, even if not beautiful.
Oh, and @elbanditoroso, I bet you would like the American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont, a small private museum that tracks the development of precision machining that enabled mass production of firearms and then manufacturing equipment in such a way that parts could be replaced with matching parts instead of having everything a one-off. Machines and metal and guns and mass production are not my thing at all, but I found the exhibits fascinating, demonstrated to us one by one by the curator, and I would say beautiful, too, but then I would have to erase this answer.