Mile High and Dry

We were a day later in leaving Forest City because we found a wet spot on the dashboard of the coach when we were about a mile out of town.  Having just had a new windshield installed and having had a torrential rain the night before... we assumed it had not been sealed entirely.  We returned to the Winnebago service center and after several hours learned the problem was that the running lights above the windshield were leaking.  They were all sealed and survived another rain that evening.  Robin finally got her way, and we did get on the road.

We headed for Omaha, NE just across the Missouri river.  Parts of I29 were closed from flooding and as we proceeded across Nebraska we encountered more storms and more flooding.

While in Omaha we traveled down the road to Lincoln a visited with Larry's cousin, Carol Jean and Leland Swanson.  Leland was a Swedish Nebraska farmer who met cousin Carol Jean at a dance in Lincoln where she had come for training in using Xrays.  He still carries her picture from those early years in his wallet, and they have had a very rich life...  good strong country stock does well.

After Omaha (where we did have some excellent steaks) we traveled to North Platte, NE.  We had hoped to stop in the museum in Kearny where the Oregon Trail joins the Platte River basin.  But, alas, the Indians where having a major Pow-Wow in Kearny that day and we could not get near the museum.

Our luck with flooding continued as one of the sites we wanted to visit was closed because it was sand-bagged right up to the front door.  The museum pictured on the right had placed sandbags around the perimeter of the grounds... with the driveway to fill in at the last minute as the river overflowed its banks.  That evening we did have a terrific storm and we ended up running through the rain to a tornado shelter as severe storms passed just south of our campground.  This was the second time in our motor home travel when we have had to seek shelter.  When you consider what a helpless target a 33 X 10 X 12 box would be in a tornado...  we do not take any chances when the warning sirens go off.

This particular historic house was open for viewing.  This was a Sears Roebuck catalog house,  and it is finely detailed inside and out.  I have been suspicious that my grandparents house in WV was also a Sears house, because I saw a very structure similar to the house on Dodd Street in a reprint of an early Sears catalog.  Looking at the insides of this house....  the Doak home could well have been from Sears.

A quick note about the North Platte River.  The settlers moving west needed a gentle path as well as a ready supply of grazing and water for their animals (and water for themselves).  The Platte River was just such a highway.  It was much too shallow to be a navigation route (as the Missouri River was),  but its broad valley sloped gently almost all the way to the continental divide.  Nearly 400,000 people made their way to Oregon in the 1840's.  We will be retracing part of that route.

But first a detour.  From North Platte, NE we dropped down to Denver, CO to visit with friends from our Pittsburgh days.  Walter and Myra Abel lived near us in Squirrel Hill and had a farm in northern PA where we retreated weekends to hike and do construction on their old farm house.  Much of Larry's first construction skills came from times he and Walt retreated to the farm.  I have a picture of Walt and Myra from the visit, but cannot get to it at this time, so we drop it in later.  We had a nice visit with the Abels and their daughter, Cathy.

From Denver we headed back north, taking to the high country north of Fort Collins and passing directly to Laramie, WY.  Beautiful country with patches of snow still in some of the valleys and complete snow cover on the mountain tops in the distance.  From Laramie we traveled west to Rawlins, WY where we will be camped for the next three days.

More to come later.

Larry