Unceasing Corn: The Nebraskan Odyssey

Our intended route was from Omaha to Medicine Bow National Park, Wyoming, but this is not what happened to us.


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Upon leaving Omaha, we were made part of a gang war with automatic weapons at a Texaco. I believe the dispute was over the grade of their meth-corn. Wait, no, that's not right. We left in usually-trusty Byzantium, but her "Check Engine!" light came on. This was alarming, because it could mean roughly four hundred things, major or minor. Luckily, right off the highway was a huge Volkswagen dealership and repair shop. We pulled in there and they ran diagnostics. The sum of the troubles is that the car is old and could use some new widgets and wiring, but still runs good. While waiting for a while, we enjoyed free wireless internet and coffee. I abused the hell out of the free infinite coffee part, let me tell y'all. Eventually we left and got back on the highway, and the next several hours are a fugue-like dream that involves nothing but corn. Nothing. Endless fields and flatlands. I thought Indiana was bad! You readers are lucky.

TOMKO: Every time I see one of those little side streets, I want to drive down it until I get to a house, knock on the door, and demand WHYYYY.
CHRIS: There is land beyond the corn.
TOMKO: What, you mean like soybeans?

The sun began to set and weariness fell upon the drivers after the exhausting sojourn through corn-based nihilism. We saw a sign on the highway for a campground, which turned out to be just a bunch of acres owned by a single guy who rents it out as a camping stopover. He only wanted twelve dollars and change for taking up a spot and pitching a tent for the night. Not a bad deal, I'd say! Especially including the fact that the place had a (questionably up-kept) putt-putt course and a merry-go-round. Also, potable water, bathrooms and hot showers. The night was not offensively cold; sleep came easily, and we broke camp and hit the road early in the morning to finish the last of our trek through one of the most boring--and deceptively expansive--states in our union.

Our surprise campsite even had WiFi!

After an indeterminate time and at an indistinguishable place, the land began to slowly elevate and rise up, continuing to gradually do so as we crossed the continental divide. I was relieved to see rocks and hills once again, which I continued to see as we made our way to Salt Lake City, Utah, sleeping a night in a national forest in the interim.

A Day in Omaha

We spent one full day just hanging around in Omaha.  J and C had to go to work, so Chris, Tomko and I were just hanging around and vegging out on the internet for a while.  Eventually, Tomko and I got hungry and we went on a walking expedition to Indian place with take-out that C had recommended.  The directions that C had left for us on the kitchen counter were probably entirely correct, but we somehow got lost several times and had to ask a wandering meth-head where we were going.

We ordered tasty food from an adorable south Asian girl who couldn't've been more than thirteen.  She warned Tomko that his meal would be spicy.  Tomko has epic spicy tolerance, so this was not concerning.  (Even I could eat the resultant meal without flinching, so it couldn't be that hot.

We hung around outside the restaurant, even though it was pretty hot, because it seemed to be pretty crowded inside.  Tomko brought me a mango lassi from inside the place for us to drink while we were waiting.  Sure enough, shortly after I had sucked the final dregs of mango, the girl appeared again for us to give her money so she could bring us our food.  We ate some food in the park, then went back to J and C's house and hung around until they got back.

We tried to watch some TV options.  Hell's Kitchen was regarded quite skeptically by C and Chris, and then we put on Jurassic Park - Rifftrax Version. This was more successful, except that J found World of Warcraft more interesting than us, then C went to bed, and then Mary Tully gave me a call with the disasterous news that Patience had broken down!

Mary and I talked until well after the movie was over. The boys went to bed, and then so did I, too. There is driving to be done!

Indianapolis to Omaha, with stopover in St. Louis

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Our next day's drive was for us to arrive in Omaha, Nebraska, where our friends J and C have been living.  J was moved to the wilds of Nebraska due to his unfortunate involvement with the Air Force.

"But Kylara," you may say, "Why did you take such a silly route?  It would have made much more sense to detour up to Gary, Indiana and then take I-80 West instead of curling down around with I-70 West and then having to go south up I-29 in order to reach back to Omaha."

Well, yes.  You are correct geographically, but you are wrong on two, no, three counts:

I have been told on good authority that Gary, Indiana, is a place to be avoided at all costs.

This would have prevented us from making a perfectly good detour to St. Louis, by all accounts a much nicer place.

Your quicker route would also have us going through Iowa. I don't know if that's any worse than Missouri--but it SOUNDS like it should be worse.

This means that we picked Chris back up at the Trader Joe's and bought some food with a gift card given to Tomko by my aunt Julie about two years ago.  It was like magical, free money that I found while moving out of my house.  We had hummus and pita and ginger beer:  This could get us through any road trip.

In the car, we discovered that the three cans of soda that Laura had given us from her house had exploded when we left them overnight in the car in Lafayette.  The car was miraculously saved from being sticky-coated by the other contents of the milk crate they were in:  a pair of my pants and Tomko's jacket.  Tomko's black zip-up hoodie is the same one that he has always had, yes, I'm sure you've seen him wearing it before.

Unfortunately, when we went into Trader Joe's I put the wet hoodie on top of the car.  I thought that Tomko would get it when we went back in the car; Tomko either didn't see it or thought that I was getting it--at any rate, Tomko's hoodie now lies sadly in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's or somewhere near it.  Rest in peace, little hoodie.

Dan Hunter guided us into St. Louis by cell phone and then showed up excited to introduce us to his roommate (and their dog, who inexplicably found itself very upset at my presence but seemed to like Tomko and Chris just fine).  We went to eat at a diner place, the type with a dozen jukeboxes hanging on the walls as decoration, and saw bits and pieces of St. Louis on our walk.

Then we were off for Omaha!  It's a loooong, boring stretch of Missouri west to Kansas City, and then a loooong, boring but somewhat curvy stretch of the Missouri/Iowa-Nebraska border along the river.  Perhaps it is the Missouri River.  Rivers are so terribly named on maps and infrequently identified when they're anything bigger than a sign next to a tiny bridge labelled "Mountain Lake Stream", so I really don't know.  [Mountain Lake Stream:  An actual sign and location found in Virginia.  True story.]

At any rate, we got into Cedar Rapids, Iowa and crossed the river into Omaha, Nebraska.  Then the highway flung us north and east and back into Cedar Rapids.  I turned us around and we were teleported to another location without any of the proper exits, and ended up horribly lost and had to have J direct us there.

(A note to my friends:  So far, you all have been really good at giving directions.  Laura gave precise driving directions down to the second telling me what hills I'm passing over and when the road forks; Hunter prevented us from actually having to pay for parking somehow, and J managed to get me from the opposite end of town to his house in a city whose layout makes positively no sense.)

At J's house, we came in and were greeted by the two cutest Maine Coon/Siamese cats and then we were all like "welll... it's midnight," and then we all fell asleep.