Nope, never seen the “Amber Waves of Grain”, I’ve been up and down the East Coast though
As i posted in the “Ever seen the Ocean” thread, the linked Wiki picture is exactly what I thought it’d look like, the ocean, just less watery 
The local zoo (the Stone Zoo, for those in the know) has a small prairie dog exhibit, so I guess I’ve seen a circular prairie about 60 feet in circumference. It is pretty flat and bleak.
Oh yeah. Away from the city lights, on a moonless night, you can see to the end of infinity.
(I grew up in NM, traveled a lot in the West.)
Nope, never.
To me it looks a lot like the giant ranches you get in the central valley of CA, with low hills and plenty of dead grass. But I don’t know if California has real prairies. Certainly I’ve never been to anything like “Little House on the Prairie.” So the picture is quite familiar, but I don’t know that my environment is the same thing.
I’ve been out in Alberta.
The sky is… there are really no words to describe it. You feel infinite looking up at it, completely weightless.
I haven’t. The furthest west I’ve driven is from here to Waco, TX, which is too far south. I’m planning to see it one day.
I’ve lived on the West coast all my life. Last year NajaHusband, NajaHound, and I took a road trip South/Southeast through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico to Texas, then from Texas, straight up the middle of the US to Minnesota… then home again (jiggity jig).
I’d seen the Nevada desert once as a kid, and remembered it to be excruciatingly boring country. I was struck this time by how “boring” became stark and dramatic and I spent most of the drive, especially Arizona and New Mexico looking out the window instead of reading the stack of books I’d hauled along in anticipation.
When we hit Texas was the first time in my life I’d seen huge, open, endless expanses of land. I was astounded at being out in the middle of so much sky. Really, even at the ocean shore, you see all that sky out in front of you, but you’ve generally got hills and civilization at your back. In Texas, you can be in the center of 360* of nothing with the sky feeling like a dome over you, all the way around. I imagine it’s a lot like being out on the ocean, which I haven’t ever done and would be terrified to do.
We may or may not have pulled off the highway on dirt tracks, driven fifteen or twenty miles out into all that nothing, spread a blanket, and defiled Texas with certain carnal, gymnastic expressions of devotion. 
Going North up through Kansas and Nebraska, I was really surprised by how lovely that area was. I pulled us over again and again to get out at the tops of little rolling rises to look out over green fields and tidy farms, and I desperately wanted to buy some property and move there. I took a ton of photos, but none of them do justice to how pretty it is there, at least in spots.
I enjoyed the prairie a whole lot. Actually, most of the trip was pretty nice, except Oklahoma. Sorry guys, your state is pretty goddamned unappealing. I caught up on a lot of reading in Oklahoma.
As a born and raised Saskatchewanian, of settler stock on both sides of my family, I have to pick this nit. That is a perfect picture of high plains, not prairie. What you’re calling prairie is not my prairie (or the prairie as defined by Wikipedia).
People like to make fun of people from the prairies, and they like to make fun of the prairies themselves, but growing up on that bigness really ruins you for landscapes that are all frilly and busy with trees and mountains and stuff. I feel like I take a big, deep breath of air as soon as I step out of the car when I get back to the prairies. I like my skies big and my vistas endless.
Born & raised Cornhusker here as well. Right smack dab in the middle of it. Didnt see a real ocean (closest thing to it was a couple of man-made lakes) for several years later.
My great uncle wrote a beautiful poem “Out on the Plains” which spoke of its beautiful colours.
Apart from the winters, cornfields, and the tornadoes, there really is some gorgeous scenery.
Last fall my wife and I took a long weekend vacation to go hiking in the Konza Prairie and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Flint Hills of Kansas. We’ve driven through the area plenty of times on the way to Colorado, but seeing the prairie up close and personal is a completely different experience altogether.
I’ve never seen the prairie —will be rectifying that on a month-long roadtrip in May! --Woohoo!
Maybe the better question is not who has seen the prairies, but who has experienced the prairies? You don’t experience them from a car or an airplane going really fast.
Ted Turner
