July 1 - July 5
Saturday - Day One8:30: on the road. We're planning a long day, so that tomorrow's haul is not too bad. We're expecting, but not hoping for, July 4th anticipatory traffic. We are carrying our breakfast with us, and exit the Denver area listening to NPR. * Churches around here look like malls. So do schools. We passed Columbine itself on the way to Stephen's, and imagined that Columbine was a street or a neighbourhood in Littleton, and that the building we passed was the local mall. But it was the high school. Churches look like malls; schools look like malls. * North-eastern Colorado imitates the Great Plains so much it has me fooled. OK, so there are rolling mini-hills, and the landscape is not exactlly flat. And OK, so I know that from the map that we are still descending from the Rockies - each town further along the highway rests at a lower altitude than the one before. But the road is flat and straight, the horizon holds few surprises, and cattle graze on either side of the road. Here & there, too, fields of hay have been harvested, the hay stacked in bales. And off in the distance I see silos. Cowboy country. Yee-hah. * Deep in this cattle land, we pass the town of Iliff. I-76, exit 134. * Near Iliff, we pick up Nebraska NPR. Some of Nebraska is on Central Time, so that shortly after we enter the state we will lose an hour. NPR reports that it is 12 noon. Where we ara it's still 11. Coming west we gained time. Now we give it back. No such thing as a free gift. * 11/12:36 a./p.m, * Nebraska is greener, flatter even than N. Colorado. It is a HOT day: 85 degrees F predicted for Denver, and as we drive down towards the plains the sky is clear of clouds and the sun blazes. All the cattle we pass are lying down, too hot to stand. And the farms we pass STINK - recently manured, no doubt. * We drive from Ogalalla near the border into the Central Time Zone and follow the North Platte River along. In places happy green trees obscure our views. But that's just a distraction; we're on the edge of the prairies, and the bugs dive-bombing our windshield prove it. Trees, green meadows, hay and campsites border the road. * There are two advantages to prairie driving. One: the roads are straight and flat. Two: there isn't a huge amount of traffic (though Route 80 is well travelled, especially by trucks). We eat up the road. A while ago we thought to stop for lunch, but we saw nothing terribly appealing. So we dug into our cooler bag of goodies (cheese, crackers, Colorado mountain water, and cantaloupe melon) and make our own, munching our way across Nebraska to "Time of your Life" and Santana. * We have now entered the Prairies for real: CORN. We are nearly in Iowa. "If you build it, they will come." * Omaha faces Council Bluffs, another city, across the Missouri River. Omaha is in Nebraska; Council Bluffs in Iowa. We plan to stop in Omaha. We are almost there. On the other side of the highway, heading west, an unmoving line of traffic. Eastbound: movement. We have just passed Ashland, Nebraska. Rolling hills, planted in rows; corn. Lots more trees. On the horizon: a huge American flag, waving. Another. The Prairie Home Companion. We cross the Platte River. I look north and see a picture out of a painting: an island in the middle, offering trees, treelined banks, brown river. To get out of Nebraska we must cross the Missouri River. I remember crossing it three years ago: I drank it in, thirsty for it because I hadn't seen the Mississippi. |
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