Our journey today took us out of the mountains and across
the great state of Nebraska. Before we left, we enjoyed a fancy breakfast at
the Mansion in their formal dining room. We were surprised to see how many
guests were at the table, since the house seemed so quiet last night. We sat
next to a couple from Asia who was living their dream of visiting as many U.S.
state capitols as possible within two months. Quite the ambition!
Who doesn’t love a circular room in a turret? Michele was in
heaven in this place, fancy! The house was built in 1888 by Erasmus Nagle, a
successful merchant. In 1910 it was sold to Senator Warren. His wife gave it to
the YWCA in 1929. In 1985 a couple purchased it, and then sold to the current
owner in 1997, who turned it into a B&B.
On the road around 8:45am, we were soon in Nebraska.
We had the whole road ahead of us this morning and mostly to
ourselves.
We encountered an interesting smell in Scottsbluff and
thought perhaps it was a fertilizer factory, but it was a sugar refinery. It
didn’t smell especially sweet. It doesn’t seem like the corn has far to travel
to get here!
The train traffic was heavy today, coming and going, mostly
with coal. We started counting cars and the average seemed to be just under 140
cars.
We stopped for lunch in Alliance.
It got really toasty after lunch, so we quickly put on our
cool wraps. Rob said “Let’s not dilly dally in the parking lot, we’ll get too
hot before we go.” No worries there!
The cattle seemed hot as well, good thing most farms had
small lakes to support them.
We rode through the Sandhills of Nebraska for most of the
day. On Nebraska 2, this is the predominant landscape. The bumpy hills and sand
everywhere. The Sandhills is a 19,600 square mile formation and 1.3 million acres of wet lands. It is the largest sand dunes complex in the western hemisphere and is distinctive because is is mostly stabilized due to the vegetation.
The closer we got to Grand Island, the landscape was a bit
more lush and the corn was so tall it hit the bottom of the irrigation heads.
We also had a timezone change today, from Mountain to
Central. So we arrived at our hotel around 5:30pm local time. Today being a
laundry day, we got that taken care of and had a late dinner.
Tomorrow we change into another time zone and cross over into Iowa.
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