Through Nebraska to Iowa....

Wednesday, 10/3

We woke to the sound of train whistles and geese honking (in the park).  As soon as the sun rose, we were on our way back to the interstate, traveling east.  Amazing how all of a sudden the terrain has become mostly flat with some rolling hills.

An endless ribbon of highway stretches before us now......

 Miles and miles and miles of hay and corn fields, punctuated with enormous feed lots and dairy farms.

A few of the thousands of cattle we saw in big lots along the highway.

Omaha Nebraska is a truly big city, with congested highways, shopping malls and sprawling suburbs.  But at some point you cross an invisible line into farmland again, and it is as if the city never existed.  We took a little shortcut off of the interstate onto a smaller Route 6, and for 30 miles passed nothing but farm after farm.  The terraced fields were quite beautiful, actually, and there were deciduous trees again "of the right height" (to quote Mitt Romney) which was a sight to see after months in the desert.  We FINALLY found a gas station (about 10 miles away from running out of gas) and met a townswoman ("Iowa born and raised!") who was so friendly and full of curiosity about us, asking questions in a way that was utterly UN-Massachusetts-y:  where were we from and what do we do, and how long have we been traveling and were our kayaks (sticking out of the back of the truck) locked?....we learned a lot about her too (she's an insurance agent, and they'd only been kayaking once this summer on the river because of the drought, and oh we sure hope we get more snow this winter), and all in the time it took to fill up the tank.   It took me a while to figure out that she wasn't interrogating us for some nefarious reason (such as confirming that we were tofu-eating, bleeding-heart liberals--practically communists!!-- and then running us out of town), but was just being nice.

We spent the night at a Walmart parking lot in Atlantic, Iowa.  Did a little shopping (of course), then listened to the debate streamed live via our home NPR station, WAMC.  Nils fell asleep half=way through.  Can you blame him?