10PM Omaha Nebraska. We checked into our hotel here just for the night. Eight hours or so west of Chicago. Along the way, some Iowa sweet corn ice cream.
Departing is hard and stressful. We had planned to leave by 8AM but didn’t get on the road until about 10AM. Yesterday was a mini-crisis as our cat sitter called to ask us to take our cat back due to incompatibility with the other cats in the household. Fortunately our very kind neighbors stepped in to volunteer for cat duty (they were already on the hook for turtle duty as well). Our travel companions also had a small air leak in one of their car tires, prompting a detour to a local tire repair shop. Most of the drive was long and uneventful after than. We missed out on a Thai food truck by the Mississippi river and instead had sandwiches from our trunk.
Now we’re settled into a nice Hilton hotel in a trendy part of Omaha (no, that’s not a typo, Omaha has some good eatin. I just gobbled down some food court mutter paneer and it was damn good. And they have SCOOTERS. But alas, no time to explore the mysteries of Omaha. My wife plans to get up early and try the Bob Kerrey pedestrian bridge across the Missouri river in the morning. Me? I’ll be lucky if I grab the free breakfast buffet before our mandatory departure at 9:30AM. Tomorrow’s goal: make it to Denver to our AirBnB with enough daylight to matter.
This sort of drive-all-day from point A to point B travel isn’t very enjoyable. Spending 8 hours in a car only to collapse and shower in a hotel by the highway so you can repeat the same thing the next day isn’t my preferred mode of travel. Hopefully later on, we’ll have time to decamp for a few days further west, near Mesa Verde or Zion National Park to slow down and savor the landscapes of the western U.S. For now, I’m trying to catch up the news of the day and Google tomorrow’s weather forecast in a darkened hotel room with a view of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Omaha office building.