Our Stake in Omaha

We are finally "camping" - in a KOA, sleeping in the van, and heating up some leftovers on our new Bass Pro stove. We're just outside Omaha, Nebraska in the town of Gretna. It's a little buggy - gnats and flies don't totally understand how the new "Off fan" works. But I'm sitting at our picnic table, listening to the locusts buzzing in the trees and watching the sun go down, a little after 8 p.m. CST, across the cornfields. We had a great drive from Illinois, 415 miles on I-80. We crossed the mighty Mississippi (running high; they had floods in Iowa last week) and saw fields of wind turbines - about 30 in a row, stretching across the cornfields and rolling hills of Iowa. (Interesting place, Iowa. Is it "State Fair" that says "You really ought to give Iowa a try"? We have in the past - the bridges of Madison County, the Danish themed town of Elkhorn, - but we could come back for a cluster of German villages from the 1850s called Amana Colonies and, of course, there's Des Moines and Council Bluffs. It really is amazing what is out here - or anywhere for that matter - for us to see and explore.)

But no time. San Francisco beckons in 3 days. And Nebraska is more than 450 miles long!

Continuing a theme...

Well, we missed Utica (see last night's post) because of a diversion of traffic on I-80 just west of Chicago. But, in a continuing theme of last night's entry, we traveled "alternate I-80" through Newark, Lisbon, Norway, Peru, and Marseilles, all within the space of 30 minutes and geographically in Illinois. Talk about "alternate". We ended up staying the night in Ottawa - no, still in Illinois. But we got talking with a couple in the parking lot (small dog in their arms, a ball of yarn in Patty's: natural elements for a conversation to start up) who were actually from Ottawa, Canada! They're heading for Vancouver Island and decided it might be fun to visit a namesake town. Forecasts of heavy T-storms made us pass up on our planned encampment at Starved Rock State Park and settle on Holiday Inn instead. We'll watch for a camp tomorrow, somewhere in Nebraska.

On the road again...

It's 2010 and I'm going to try to keep this blog up to date with an occasional entry as we travel west to San Francisco and then North to Alaska once again. Our first day took us through several major back-ups thanks to closed lanes on I-80 in PA, but we arrived safely if late. As we drove along, I was thinking about the places that replicate other place names across the USA. I mean, here I am in Boston Heights, Ohio! Not a hill overlooking the Massachusetts city. Not too far from here is Miami (OH) and on the way out, we passed by the Jersey Shore in Pennsylvania. (I've heard that a group from NJ settled on the banks of a nearby river and the natives of the area began to call that bank of the river "the Jersey shore".) And we also passed nearby Indiana, Pennsylvania - those folks just can't decide where they are!
Of course, there's only one Rahway.
Tomorrow, it's off to Utica...Illinois.