Hopefully you remember from last week that my wife and I recently made the drive out to Denver Colorado to watch our niece play softball with her travel team. @mrsbozz and I rented a car and drove, meanwhile, our brother in law also decided to make the drive solo so he could haul all the stuff that his wife and two daughters didn't want to take on the plane.
As the day progressed on Thursday, we learned that we couldn't get into the rental house until 3:00 PM on Saturday. Since "the girls" were scheduled to fly in around 7:00 AM Denver time, that left them with a whole lot of time to be sitting around doing nothing.
@mrsbozz and I were supposed to have a short drive on Friday going from Davenport Iowa to Lincoln Nebraska, but we changed out plans to make our driver longer on Friday. That would put us closer to Denver on Saturday morning so we could pick up my sister in law and our nieces. I quickly cancelled our room in Lincoln on Thursday night and booked us a stay in North Platte Nebraska.
Just outside of Danvenport Iowa is the I-80 Truck Stop. As you can see from the photos, it's billed as the largest truck stop in the world. Since we had only been on the road for about a half hour after leaving our hotel in Davenport, we made the choice not to stop and check it out.
Quite honestly, it looked like a hot mess. I'd much rather take the time to visit a Buccee's for the first time or something like that. It was cool to say we have seen it, but that's about it!
Adjusting our plans meant that we wouldn't get the chance to make many sight seeing stops in Iowa and Nebraska, but quite honestly, it would have been miserable anyway. It was raining most of the drive and the traffic around Des Moines was pretty heavy.
It was pretty tiring staying focused when the conditions were like this. I also have to mention that truck drivers on I-80 are a completely different breed. They have zero fear and they run full bore no matter the conditions.
Most truckers I have seen do their best to find large gaps when changing lanes or moving over. That wasn't the case on I-80. Any spare inch between vehicles and these trucks are going to fill it. You just better be paying attention!
I don't fault them for it, they have a job to do and places to be, but it was a completely different experience than I am used to.
The good news was, once we got into Nebraska the weather cleared up and while the speed limit in Iowa is only 65 or 70 MPH, the speed limit on I-80 in Nebraska is 75 MPH. It was finally time to open up the Ford Explorer and let her run.
As I have said before, I didn't hate Iowa and Nebraska as much as I thought I would. When it wasn't raining there was a lot of green and rolling hills to see. It was actually kind of beautiful. The drive was still long and tedious, but the scenery (at least the first time) made it quite nice.
Somewhere along the way, @mrsbozz fell asleep and I had to quickly grab my phone and take a shot while we were traveling under this arch.
"The Archway, built in 1999, pays tribute to the pioneers who trekked across the country on Nebraska's Great Platte River Road. This 308-foot bridge spans I-80 near Exit 275 in Kearney, emulating a covered bridge at sunset."
We didn't bother to stop, but I'm glad I grabbed at least one shot of it.
While we were supposed to stay in a Hampton Inn in Lincoln, I booked us into a Tru (by Hilton) hotel in North Platte. It's supposed to be a trendy hotel with smaller rooms, acknowledging the fact that many travelers don't actually spend much time in their rooms.
It was actually a nice little room and we didn't mind the small size. In addition to that, it felt like the cleanest room we stayed in during our travels on this trip (besides the rental house). I liked the vinyl plank floor as opposed to the usual carpet most hotels have. I'd hate to see what kind of science experiments live in some of those carpets!
The Tru Hotel was looking even better after we drove around town a bit and found this gem of a place in North Platte!
The town of North Platte is actually pretty cool with several historic locations to visit. It also has your typical shopping area with all of the chain restaurants and things like that. Then there are the other areas of town where the normal residents live. Those areas were about what you would expect for a place in the middle of America.
North Platte was actually a lot larger than I anticipated when looking at the map. We tried to find a couple things we could do before settling in for the night.
It turns out North Platte is a pretty big hub for rail travel in the country, so it has a pretty long and storied railway history. There is a tower called the "Golden Spike Tower" that pays homage to some of this legacy. I thought about visiting thinking it was the location where the actual golden spike was driven into the ground connecting the two railways, but it turns out, that is somewhere in Utah or something like that. Instead, I took us to a local park to drive around and look at the sights.
They had this cool railway display there.
@mrsbozz opted to wait in the car because it was quite hot out (and she doesn't really care about trains). I tried to get these shots as quickly as I could. I probably could have spent more time walking around and I doubt my wife would have minded, but I was trying to be respectful of her time too. Plus, we were getting hungry after being on the road all day!
If I were to ever go back, I would definitely like to take a stroll through the caboose and any of the other cars they had open on the trains. I'd also maybe check out the visitors center. It doesn't look like this place gets a lot of traffic, but maybe we just came at a bad time.
In any event, I thought these photos might fit really well into the #trains community that @livinguktaiwan started a while go.
Finally, I'm going to leave you with a photo of the river the town gets its name from. It doesn't look very impressive in this shot, but it's actually quite wide if not very deep in the area we visited. We actually found ourselves crossing over different branches of the Platte several times on our travels.
Check back on Wednesday when I talk about where we ate in North Platte!
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