Travel, they say, is broadening. Well, when you spend 12-plus hours in a car driving across the country, travel certainly broadens your rear end. We racked up over 600 miles our first day out and felt very “broad” by the end of the day.
Surely someone will ask why you were driving when air travel would be so much faster. The short answer is, I don’t fly. I have a vertigo condition that makes air travel very uncomfortable. That aside, we enjoy driving. We see so much more when driving. Driving across the country compared to flying is comparable to walking to work versus driving. When you walk you see many things you never notice when whizzing by in a car. Driving from New York to Colorado allows us to see places and visit people impossible in faster modes of travel. Besides, we are in no hurry.
I spent a great deal of my life hurrying to get to work, to get a report in, to mow the lawn before a storm, or hurrying for something that often turned out to be not all that important. I don’t hurry anymore.
Driving across Ohio we noticed that the state was cutting back on mowing right-of-ways by only mowing the first 10-12 feet and letting the rest grow to natural height. This practice not only saves on mowing expenses but allows natural grasses and flowers to flourish along the roadways, helping reestablish these native floras. It looked as if the state might have mowed higher along the right-of-way once last fall just to keep trees and shrubs in check. Otherwise, only the area immediately adjacent to the roadway was kept regularly mowed. Apparently the highway department in Ohio is capable of thinking outside the box.
Driving through several road-construction areas gave us insight to how well road construction engineers these days are at keeping traffic moving. Yes, we had to slow down and, yes, there were some delays in a few areas, but by and large the construction zone was maintained in a manner that allowed an impressive flow of traffic – except for those who were rushing to work or easily annoyed.
It is easy and tempting at times to notice the angry or inconsiderate driver. Just talk to anyone about driving conditions and they will invariably tell about some jerk they saw weaving through traffic, speeding way beyond the generally allowable 5-7 mph above the posted speed limit. But if you sit in a car all day as we did you cannot help but marvel that there are so many cars speeding along at 60 to 75 miles per hour (depending on the state) with everyone staying in their designated lane. In some areas you are separated from oncoming traffic – traveling just as fast as you – by only a double yellow line painted on the road surface. And most of the time no one gets hurt. Amazing!
We reached Omaha, Nebraska the second day, our intended destination. My niece lives there and we wanted to visit with her and take in the Omaha Zoo, reportedly one of the better zoos in the nation. My niece’s ex-husband works at the zoo and was able to get us free passes. (See, I told her, he is good for something.) There was just one problem. Omaha was caught in part of that bubble of heat that was searing the mid-west. The morning temperature quickly rose to 95 degrees, and that was before we even left to go to the zoo. According to the TV weather person, the heat index started at 105 degrees and topped out at 110 degrees.
Many of the zoo exhibits are housed in air-conditioned buildings. That was great. The problem was that you had to go outside to get from one building to another, and we had my niece’s son, daughter-in-law, and two year old daughter with us. In addition, my niece is in a wheelchair. Hence, we did not move very quickly from building to building. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my niece and her family and knew that they would be going with us. (It was good-ole dad, after all that furnished the tickets.) I am just reporting that it was brutally hot and when we left an air-conditioned building to step outside, the change in temperature took you breath away. All of us wanted to get to the next building as fast as possible.
We enjoyed our visit to the zoo, got to see some fantastic exhibits, and enjoyed going to dinner with everyone that evening when we could sit and visit over a cool margarita.
We continued our adventure the next day by scooting across a large chunk of Nebraska on I-80 to North Plate where we turned south to see if we could find Dancing Leaf. This is billed as a cultural learning center on primitive Native American life.
Dancing Leaf is located near Wellfleet, Nebraska. Wellfleet, I believe, has a population of 100 and is easy to miss. Further, the sign for Dancing Leaf had been knocked down and we nearly drove my without stopping. Fortunately, we saw a postal delivery car and got directions, and it is good that we did. The stop-over was well worth our time. Les Hosick took us through a 90 minute presentation of early American life, including the time before people passed over the land bridge in Alaska to inhabit this land. Nebraska, it turns out, was once under a shallow sea and the area around Wellfleet is famous for the quantity and quality of fossil plant and animal remains.
It turns out that much of what we think we know about the plains Indians, largely gleaned from movies, is incorrect. Before the white man came with horses and metal implements, the plains Indians were more agricultural than we think. The lived in generally fixed homes, much like the Iroquois of the Northeast, and raised crops, notably corn, squash and beans. They hunted, for sure, but following the buffalo herds as often depicted in movies was out of the question before the introduction of horses to their way of life. Meat in their diets came from deer, antelope, hares and other small animals.
It was a learning experience and Joyce and I both enjoyed the two hours or so we spent there.
The next day we made a dash for Denver where Joyce’s two brothers live. When we crossed over the Mississippi from Illinois to Ohio our GPS showed the elevation as 603 feet. By the time we got to Omaha the elevation was over 1200 feet. Now, at Denver, we are over 5,000 feet. We will hang out here for several days, visiting with family, before going on to our ranch west of Colorado Springs where the altitude is nearly 9,000 feet. We have learned from experience that we do better if we let out bodies get acclimated to the altitude gradually.
Oh, by the way, the temperature this morning at Florissant, the nearest town to our place, was 55 degrees. As I write this at 10:00 a.m. the temperature in Denver is 86 and it is 66 at Florissant. I’m ready for some cool, dry weather!
