Route Map, Day 3, Mid – Iowa to Laramie, Wyoming
Wagon Ruts, Bad Gas, and a gradual climb
We woke up Sunday morning after a somewhat fitful rest. Who’d have thought that Atlantic, Iowa had a Saturday night social scene that made South Beach, Mardi Gras, and the Vegas strip on New Year’s Eve look like an antiquarian’s knitting conclave and tea party. I took a look out the window to see if the outside world has survived the Apocalypse. And why was a burg about 1100 miles from any body of water larger than a swimming pool named “Atlantic”? We’d parked out near the edge of the largish Walmart parking lot, but I was puzzled to see half a dozen cars parked right around me, like satellites around a mother ship. 65 acres of lot, and the first 10 people queueing up to shop chose to park in my shadow. Odd. The weather was bright and clear, with a warm sun, and the breeze was noticeable. As it turned out, the wind out of the north was to become rather a constant for the rest of the trip, and became more pronounced the farther west we got. It also brought the smoky haze from wildfires that were plaguing the upper midwest, so the horizon was almost always just a brown band of miasma, separating the land from the blue sky above.
Once everyone was roused and up, we trundled into the Walmart to buy a microwave. The one we had in the RV had started life back in the house, but it had begun to act flaky, so we bought a new one for the kitchen, and stuck the house unit in the RV. It got even flakier there, so we just decided to chuck it and buy another new one for the coach. I suppose it’s some sort of 21st Century statement that you buy $100 microwaves with barely a thought. Most of our cooking was done on a gas grill outside anyway, but the RadarRange was good for a quick heat of a cup of coffee.
We noticed that there were a good number of orange traffic control barrels around the parking area, I wondered aloud if they were arranged in some sort of odd signaling shape, visible only to space aliens like some sort of corn-belt Nazca Lines, but I was told they were for driver’s ed.
After a quick breakfast and a check around the coach, we took a look at the map, to try to figure out how to get back to the interstate. Our side trip here the night before had more or less set off on a south-southwesterly heading, and I didn’t think it was efficient to head back along that same route, as we’d be backtracking a dozen or so miles. But it looked as though if we left the lot, made a left, then a right, we’d be on a country road out through the fields heading back north to I-80. So we did. It was a pleasant, short run for a half-dozen miles or so, through rural Iowa, bounded by corn fields, grain elevators, and white painted farmhouses.
Through Iowa and Nebraska
We crossed over top of the interstate and the lanes stretched off into the distance on both sides – and took the entrance ramp back on to the highway, and put the hammer down. Within minutes, we were chewing up the asphalt at a very snappy 57 miles an hour…
Wind turbines dotted the plains. Oddly, very few were moving, which led me to believe that they weren’t completely done yet, or weren’t connected to the grid. A couple of dozen miles into the morning, road construction started. It wasn’t too bad, actually, they just shunted everyone over to a one-lane in either direction chunk for a bit, and then back over, and then a mile or so down the road, do it again. We were able to keep our speed to around 45 or so, which wasn’t bad. Iowa stretched off into the distance.By around 10:45 A.M., we found ourselves on the outskirts of Council Bluffs, where we’d make our crossing of the wide Missouri over to Omaha.. There was some really odd sculpture adorning an overpass, so I took a picture of it.
River Crossing #7 – Across the Wide Missouri
A couple of wide, sweeping bends through Council Bluffs, and we headed over the river to Nebraska. The river looked a little dry, and wasn’t quite the spectacle I expected.The far bank was dominated by a reminder of this city’s 19th century importance as the eastern hub of the transcontinental railroad, with a huge Union Pacific locomotive glued to the side of the hill.
Omaha was pretty quiet, even for a drowsy Sunday morning in the summer. It was warm and breezy, and maybe everybody was busy snoozing in church. We followed the signs for I-80 and shot across 10 lanes of fresh concrete, heading for Lincoln and the wide, open spaces.
Welcome Center Memories
I remembered the Nebraska Welcome Center from my first trip on I-80, back in 1975. A plaque commemorated the half-century of the Interstate out here, and I took a panorama of the Platte River Valley. It was warm, windy, and slightly buzzy with insect noises. After a while we headed back west, and the flat ribbon of slightly aged asphalt and concrete ka-thumped us onward… A few miles down the road, there was a jet mounted on a pylon, advertising the SAC museum nearby. Omaha was the center of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command during the Cold War of the 50s and 60s. The area gradually lowered in importance as ICBMs and Star Wars supplanted B-52s, but there were still a whole bunch of armed and ready bombers hidden back in the trees, just in case the world reverted to 1958.
River Crossing #8 – The Platte
Just past the air museum, we crossed the Platte River. It wasn’t much to look at, this time of year was a dry season. But I hear that it could get quite wet in spots, depending on rainfall and all. This part of the country is too far from any mountain region to have snow melt be a factor, and it’s so flat that the current is hardly noticeable. The Eugene T. Mahoney State Park flowed by to the north.
Nebraska sped by under our wheels. We passed through north of Lincloln right around noon, and then encountered some of the rumored road construction. A brand new ribbon of smooth black macadam was being laid down, arrow straight across the prairie, and we shared the lanes with the eastbound traffic, while the westbound lanes were being dug up and repaved. This same sequence happened half a dozen times as we motored on. The attendant back at the Welcome Center had remarked to me that Nebraska has only two seasons – Winter, and Road Construction.
You Just Passed The Great Platte River Road Museum!
Just down the road now was Kearny, along the banks of the Platte. Parts of several of the old pioneer Conestoga-wagon trails followed this same route a century and a half ago – the Oregon Trail, the Mormons, even the Pony Express all followed these same twists and turns in the river, never straying too far from the water, and keeping one eye out for the sometimes unfriendly native tribes. Just outside of Kearny, there was a big span over the road, the Great Platte River Road Museum and Gift Shop. Oddly though, the planners neglected to put it anywhere near an exit from I-80, so unless you knew it was coming, and got off the road about a dozen miles eastward, all you could do is gape at it as you went by. (I understand that the Nebraska DOT has now dropped an exit ramp at the thing.)
Crappy Gas almost derails us
Next stop was the little town of Lexington – we pulled off the interstate to gas up. We pulled into a Conoco station and Hal did the honors while I wandered around and took a couple of pictures and Melissa got an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins. The weather was bakingly hot, an outside thermometer read 102′, and the breeze felt like a pizza oven had been opened in your face. We could smell the sharp tang of the wildfires south of us in Colorado. After the fill-up, a windshield wash, and leg-stretching, we got back on the interstate. After a few miles, we heard the generator start to oscillate in power, slowing down and then speeding up, and then shutting off altogether. We needed that bad boy to run the big and powerful coach air conditioning unit up on the roof, there was no way the dash A/C would keep us cool in the 95+ degree heat, especially behind the greenhouse glass of the massive windshield. Hal would hold the power button in, get the beast started again, and a minute later it would shut down. We decided to get off at the next real exit and take a look at it. As we came to the stop at the end of the off-ramp, the engine in the Bounder died. Just what I wanted to do – have a break down in the middle of Nebraska on a Sunday afternoon when it was 100′ in the shade. The engine started right back up, though, and we sputtered a couple of hundred yards into town, and turned westward on Route 30, the famed Lincoln Highway, which had been paralleling the interstate since about Dayton.
Cozad was straight out of Central Casting, as it were. Feed stores, pickup trucks, sleepy people, and slightly mangy dogs. At the first stop light, which of course turned red as I approached it so that the only other person awake in town could cross from the Rite Aid to the Sherwin-Williams, both of which were closed, the engine died again. Hal opined that we were suffering vapor lock. I knew that was a possibility, given the hot weather. But then I happened to see the receipt from the Conoco station a dozen miles back. Hal had filled the 75 gallon tank with E-85, a blend of ethanol “flex fuel” designed to run in new engines. Back east, we have a 10% blend that some newer cars and trucks can take, but it wreaks havoc in older, non-computer controlled engines. I could just imagine how well our ancient powerplant would run on a blend that was 85% Mazola corn oil. It was like trying to get a biscuit to catch fire and explode. Every time the engine slowed, it died. That was our problem with the generator as well, since it drew from the same tank. All we could do it glide down Route 30, enjoying the country side rushing by at 45 miles an hour, and try to burn as much of the Crisco as we could. Between the engine cutting out every time we slowed to 5 mph, the wind trying to blow us sideways into the Platte River, and the Sahara-like temperatures, all we’d need to complete the picture was an attack by a band of marauding Sioux.
You can almost feel the wagon ruts. We crossed over the Platte again somewhere out there, weaving back and forth between the interstate, the railroad, and the river.
We stayed on Route 30 all the way to Sydney, where I thought maybe we’d run enough crap out of the tank to get a couple gallons of better gas in. I pulled into a Shell station and ran in about 15 gallons of Super V-Power 103 octane jet fuel, as much as it would take, until the $4.97 a gallon stuff was sloshing out the fuel filler neck. It seemed to help, and we got back on the interstate. The generator was still coughing and sputtering, and I could see the voltage meter on it waver between an anemic 78 volts, and an alarming 135, but at least it kept the A/C going. We’d been very slowly climbing in elevation, and after another hour or so we slid into Wyoming’s extreme lower right corner at Pine Bluffs, elevation 5,103 feet. I could see neither pines nor bluffs, and assumed the same person had named both here and Atlantic, Iowa.
Wyoming at last – the Real West
A welcome center/rest stop was just a mile or so inside the border. We pulled in, and I wandered round the place. It was almost a state park, with hiking trails, a playground, fine marble and stone rest rooms, and plenty of parking. I clambered up some of the trails and snapped away, looking north across the interstate towards Canada. It felt nice to finally be ‘out west’.
Back on the road, the pavement twisted and turned, climbing up towards Cheyenne. Storm clouds hung ominously on the horizon, and we could actually see localized rainstorms dropping moisture here and there across the otherwise dry and dusty plains. This was not Yellowstone-ey Wyoming, this was bare, treeless, cow country.We passed a huge Walmart distribution center on the outskirts of Cheyenne. There must have been five hundred semi trailers arrayed around the place. This was just a small corner of it.
The High Point!
About twenty miles farther on, we encountered fairly steep twisty turny roadway, the most severe elevation changes we’d seen since the Alleghenys in western Maryland two days ago. Then suddenly at the very top. was another rest stop park, memorializing this as the highest point of I-80 from coast to coast, and also commemorating US 30, which was pointed out to be running along the ridge line half a mile away. Since much of I-80 paralleled the old US-30 “Lincoln Highway”, out west here, it was an interesting place. Big statue of Ol’ Honest Abe, some Purple Heart veteran’s plaques, and a somber warning about bears.
After the rest area, we skied down about 4,000 feet in five miles, careening madly between the truck run-off ramps and solid granite walls. We skidded to stop in Laramie and shunted off the main drag to buzz through town. We passed the campus of the University of Wyoming, and had dinner alongside a cute little town park in the middle of town. As darkness approached, we decided to turn around and head back to a large Walmart SuperCenter we’d seen on the way in, and spend the night. There were half a dozen or so other RVs parked in the outlying area of the lot. I took some pictures of Laramie’s evening cityscape , and we ran the generator all night to try to burn more of the corn oil out. The air smelled like wood smoke, at about 85 degrees.
