Ruly Road Trip 2012 – Day 14 – Wyoming and Nebraska
We left Wyoming the next morning, headed east through Nebraska. The landscape slowly morphed from mountains to plains.
You often hear the phrase “middle of nowhere” when driving through places such as this. After all the traveling we have done across the United States, I don’t like to use this phrase. After hours spent in the car staring out the window, you start to realize that everywhere has something to offer, even if it is “just” the landscape. In this part of the country, though, it is true that you are somewhat literally disconnected as cell phone service (at least data service) was practically nonexistent.
As with every state, there were some unique aspects of Nebraska:
Advertising for the antler trade
Large religious sculptures
Cropdusters
Cattle Feed lots (the stench from this enormous feed lot was overpowering!)
We also saw plenty of wind turbine farms as well as trucks transporting the enormous wind turbine blades. Trying to shoot pictures of trucks carrying the blades in the opposite direction required very a very fast shutter finger. I was reminded of physics problems in high school about two trains passing each other. Fortunately I managed to catch a shot.
We stopped for lunch in North Platte, Nebraska, feasting on delicious Japanese-inspired cuisine. The restaurant owners were incredibly indulgent as our son crawled around exploring their koi pond. When they served our meals, they took the extra step of creating “child-friendly” chopsticks for our children by creating an impromptu tweezer out of the chopsticks with the paper chopsticks wrapper and a rubber band.
They were a success even for my 4-year old!
Our meal ended with fortune cookies. All of the fortunes were terrific words of wisdom!
After lunch we headed to the Golden Spike Tower in North Platte, Nebraska.
It is advertised as “the world’s largest bailey yard.” I didn’t know what a bailey yard was and I was in for an education. Before visiting the Golden Spike Tower, I had a very simplistic understanding of the rail system in the United States. I assumed that train travel worked much the same as airline travel. If you want to move yourself or your goods, you book passage from Point A to Point B. What I was missing was that sometimes manufacturers load up their goods on a train and just get them moving to market. As the train travels, businesspeople are actively buying and selling the goods on board the rail cars and they let the engineer know when and where to dump cars along the route based on the sales.
Changing around the cars on a train appears to be a highly complicated process on the face of things. How do they do it? There is a big hill in the bailey yard known as the “hump.” The train drives to the top of the hill and the railyard workers slowly uncouple the cars and let them roll downhill to the next waiting train. The North Platte railyard sorts 3,000 railroad cars a day and over 10,000 train cars pass through North Platte daily!
Overall, it was quite an eye-opening stop.
Afterward, we continued east, stopping at a highway rest stop to view some art. Yes, really! Nebraska undertook a public art effort in 1973 to celebrate Nebraska’s bicentennial. Nebraska commissioned major artists to create works of art along various rest stops on I-80, which runs straight across the state. The one that sounded most interesting was George Baker’s “Nebraska Wind Sculpture” near Kearney. The work is a large metal sculpture of modern design that floats around a lake.
When we arrived, we saw the lake but no sculpture! After some looking, we found the sculpture stranded in a small cove.
Yet another victim of the droughts. I think the artist would find this an interesting continuum of its kinetic journey. While it wasn’t the floating whirligig I envisioned, it was still wonderful to see such beauty at a highway rest stop.
We continued on our route, scheduled to overnight near Lincoln, Nebraska. As the sun was setting, we called ahead to the restaurant we selected for the evening to confirm they would still be open when we arrived. Sadly, the answer was no and it was the same story with several other restaurants we tried. We even tried to find a Little Caesar’s pizza location per our children’s request. Did you know that there are no Little Caesar’s franchises in all of Nebraska? Explain that one to a 6-year-old!
So, again, it was McDonald’s for dinner. By this point, we were so tired it didn’t matter and our kids never tire of their grilled chicken sandwich. We collapsed into our economy hotel and fell soundly asleep.
Continue reading: Day 15 – Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois