The ride home

Well, so the past couple weeks have gone by quickly. I have one more batch of photos, which includes pictures of our Mt. Hood excursion (we didn’t hike to the top of it) and my trip to the coast with Frank. We moved out last Friday and drove to Idaho, where we stayed a night with my good friend Ben Young (who has his own business — we’re so proud.) Then we google-mapped our way home and it turned out that the Wyoming/Nebraska route (I 80, pretty much) was faster than the Montana/South Dakota route (I 90). So we went that way.

I got to step foot in Utah (which I hadn’t done yet), and then we suffered some major boredom through two 400+-mile states. Here are the highlights:

• Sidney, Nebraska is the world headquarters of Cabela’s. Got to see that.
• It was really exciting to get to Omaha, cuz it had trees.
• I’ve never been so happy to make it to Des Moines before sunrise.

We stayed in Kearney, Nebraska our second night; we got in late to the KOA, so I night-registered, which involves filling out a form and putting money inside. In the morning, I went to the front desk to check out and get my change. The guy at the desk asked if I had a KOA card, and I said no. He said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t need a receipt, I’ll give you the discount rate.”

Later Eileen and I were talking about how Midwestern it was of him. You run a campground in a small town in Nebraska; some couple comes through late at night on a road trip; you’ll probably never see them again, and even if they tell their friends how nice the owners of the Kearney KOA were, the fact is that travelers like this late-night patron probably don’t plan on which KOA they’ll be stopping at. But you give him a discount anyway.

In Iowa, between Cedar Rapids and Dubuque, the bugs hitting our windshield were unreal. It was like driving through a light rain. And then once we hit Platteville, Wisconsin my allergies started acting up big time. And when we got out of the car in Madison, the humidity was staggering. Did you know that you sweat more at 11:30 pm on a summer night in Wisconsin than you do at noon on a 95-degree day in Portland?