IN NEBRASKA, MIDDLE OF USA

On Thursday morning we all went into Marysville and had a buffet breakfast at a small restaurant. We then went to Rock Creek Station about 50 miles, so we are now in Nebraska. It was the next Pony Express stop and also where the wagons had to make a difficult stream crossing. Rock Creek Station is a state park and had a very nice visitor center. It has three mural made out of bricks, very impressive. The woman at the visitor center was very friendly and gave us good directions to our next campground in Minden, Nebraska.

A bridge was built to help the pioneers cross this stream with its steep sides. Up to $1.00 was charged to cross the bridge.

Today our group went to the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. This is one of my favorite museums. We have stopped here twice before and I still enjoyed going through it again. It is very well done. the Archway goes across I-80. The theme of the exhibit is western expansion from the pioneer trail, transcontinental railroad, Lincoln highway, and fiber-optic cable, all following the Great Platte River Road. The archway is in Kearney, NE which is the middle of the USA. It is 1733 miles to the west coast and 1733 miles to the east coast.

We are camping at Harold Warp's Pioneer Village in Minden, NE. He was the inventor of Flex-O-glass and his grandparents were homesteaders in Minden. The village is made up of at least ten original buildings that have been moved here and are filled with every item you can think of since 1830. It took us three hours to go through it and we probable only saw half of it. You could spend days here. It is a fascinating place.

Here is my new bike. Larry and I took a ride around the town of Minden. Many of the cross streets had no stop signs. There really isn't very much traffic. I even drove the RV for 70 miles yesterday on the back country roads. There was very little traffic and the roads are very straight and you can see miles ahead. The only problem is the road have no shoulder, so I had to keep the RV between the lines.

Of course we are now following the railroad lines and the tracks are usually only a block or two away from our campground. We listen to the train whistles all day and night.