Minutes from downtown and the events center, the Best Western Plus Grand Island Inn & Suites, Grand Island, Nebraska, is a welcoming retreat in the center of it all, with a full hot breakfast, an indoor heated pool, a fitness center, meeting space, a business center, and spacious rooms with microwaves, mini-fridges, and high-speed Wi-Fi. The setting puts the state fairgrounds, a horse-racing park, and a prairie-pioneer museum close by, with festivals and youth sports tournaments throughout the year. Downtown dining and shopping sit just minutes away. Grand Island sits at the heart of central Nebraska on the wide, braided Platte River, a farm-and-ranch hub that hosts the Nebraska State Fair. Each spring the river just outside town becomes one of the planet's great wildlife stages, as more than half a million sandhill cranes, around 80 percent of the world's population, roost on its sandbars and feed in the cornfields before continuing north, a spectacle best seen at dawn and dusk from late February into early April.