Not just a Springsteen Album

Well, first - yesterday's promised pictures:

 Actually today:

So our illustrative night at the Rainbow Motel went fine, but we were awake and not particularly comfortable in the wee hours.  I don’t think we have ever actually adjusted to MT time.  At 4:30 am we decided we’d had enough and we might as well just hit the road. 

We were driving South by 5:30 before sun up.  Which was nice, I got to see some stars.  (It doesn’t get dark here till much later and I haven’t been able to stay awake long enough.)  We drove and drove as the sun rose following the “scenic highway” vertically through the state to meet up with the interstate.

NE has a very different landscape than the other places we’ve been.  It started off kind of range like, then got more mound like, leveled off into wide expanse of flat nothing and by the time we hit the interstate it has become flat, big sky, farms, and trees.  We’ve seen lots of water pump windmills and lots of cows.

What’s weird is that NE has a much more to see out the window.  There are some houses, there are small, no horse, maybe a chicken? towns, barns, cows, trees, fences - not many roads, lots of railroad, and yet some how it manages to be duller, less interesting, and more monotonous than any place else I’ve ever seen. 

I don’t want to imagine what it would have been like on the Oregon trail - weeks of  ‘hey look, grass!’    And big sky and a few lakes, or not - there is little here I’d want to see again.  That being said, the people here have been super nice.  Much nicer than SD.

In SD they’d hear CT and get a little stand offish.  Here, they here CT and they want to know all about our travels.

Around 7:30 this am, we stopped in a little road side convenience store/diner.  The outside was a little questionable, but the food was great.  A few hours later, we came to Buffalo Bill Cody’s home.  We stopped and saw his house.  I’d love it on the coast of Maine.

I can’t warm up to Buffalo Bill.  I admit I’ve had many the childhood fantasy of joining his show as Annie Oakley, but it was a very … Hollywood fantasy. (“Anything you can do, I can do better … I can shoot a sparrow, with a bow and arrow…”)  But BB just seems like a jerk.  I mean, he killed lots of buffalo, he scouted Native Americans for the government, he didn’t portray them very well in his show…  I just don’t like him.

But his house was nice.  After his house we stopped at the major tourist trap store, but it had a miniature of his complete show (including the side show I might add - another thing for the above list.) I love miniatures though.  I’m sure it has something to do with having  things smaller than I am.

A ways down the road we stopped at Pony Express stop.  That turned out to be very educational.  Did you know that they wanted and hired kid’s under 18 and most around age 11?  And they stopped every 10 miles to change horses - drivers changed every 100 miles.  Drivers had two minutes to change horses and the mail was carried on the horse not in bags  by the driver.  My last bit of this knowledge was that although there were lots of stops (every 10 miles from Missouri to the West Coast)  mail was only picked up at the first stop and for the time it was very expensive!

Clearly, liked the pony express.  From there we went on to Kearney where we are currently.  We’ve toured the local art museum, which I liked more than M.   It was NE artists, mostly contemporary work, and much of it photorealism, which I like. 

My greatest thrill of the day though (aside from giving in to the week of 100+ temperatures and buying a hat) was realizing that every highway access ramp has gates to close the highway.  Gates.  Can you imagine how bad it must be and how frequently it must be that bad in winter to have GATES that close the highway?

I don’t think I could survive here in winter.  Because of our early start, we are trying to call it an early night.  I think we’ll be in Lincoln tomorrow.