I’ve hit the humidity wall. Already can’t wait till it’s over.

 

No love for me in Omaha

The rest of the day was kind of a mess. Omaha has two nice municipal campgrounds. I navigated to the first one, it was closed. I navigated across town to the second one, and it tells me I am welcome tomorrow night, but not tonight. You must make a reservation – no walk-ins – and you can’t make a same-day reservation. So that was a big fuck-you from Omaha to me. Too bad, it was a nice place on a little pond with plenty of empty spots which wanted to help fill, but no go. I was pretty annoyed.

The Lewis & Clark National Headquarters is downtown on the river. Where else would it be? It shares a big, wide public space with the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge and other civic wonders too numerous to mention. I got there just before closing, which seemed to be part of my Omaha losing streak. But not really. This is the administrative center of the L&C enterprise and the whole Park Service for the midwest. A stuffed bear and a couple of exhibits in the lobby are all they offer in the way of “interpretive exhibits”. So chalk up another FAIL for Omaha.

The artwork and riverwalk decorations on the other hand pleasantly surprised me – a huge Soviet-modern “hail to the proletariat” sculpture, and on the fence along the riverwalk about 30 plaques for individual unions. I had no idea Omaha was so into Organized Labor! I walked around enjoyed all that. Did everything except walk the pedestrian bridge to Iowa. It was very nice, but I need to find a place to stay before dark. The closest plausible place going south is in Iowa called Pony Creek Campground. Get back on the interstate, drive 20-odd miles, get off and drive east across the river for a short while and take a left (north).

You drive about 5 miles of gravel road, until a kind of architecturally interesting building comes into view on the right. Take a right into the little hollow it’s in. At the back end the hollow is a loop with 12 campsites. That’s it. There’s absolutely no one here. While I was unpacking, a dad and two boys drove a camper to the back of the loop, unhooked it, leveled it, and left. I am pretty sure they never came back. Don’t know what that’s about….

This is basically a pretty nice place, but it’s quite uncomfortable tonight. The air is completely still and it’s very hot and humid, and I’m just not in the mood for it. I have my official post-drive beer, then I take the short walk down the campground road to the main gravel road. The interesting building is some kind of nature/education center, and it’s pretty cool. It’s designed so you can explore the veranda even though it’s closed. It’s got a very nice deck with picnic tables, and I sit for a while and stare at Iowa nature, Then I walk back. My entire body is slick with sweat from this small effort.

I am miserably hot. There’s still no one else here, so I took an impromptu shower at the water pump. Soap up a little bit and pour bowls of cold water over my head. It turned out to be really, really refreshing, and the rest of the evening was pretty comfortable.

Thursday (Sep 20)

As mentioned in the description, those county buildings I’m parked across from are a hive of activity from 8 am onward, so I got going a little earlier than I otherwise might have. I start the van, coast down the hill a few hundred feet, and stop and park to check out the inside of the Education Center. I liked it very much.

As it happened, the county official that manages it was prowling around the public area when I got there. He was chatty, personable, very pleased with himself, a classic political type. He told me the whole story on the building – the expensive architect who submitted an expensive plan, and the successive whittling down of the pricey parts until we got to the current building. I think the result is very user-friendly and extremely pleasing to the eye, but when you get right down to it, it’s just a “shoebox with a flat roof”, which is as cost-saving as you can get in terms of having regular contractors do regular things in their comfort zone. So for my two cents, he has every right to be pleased with himself about about the building.

The lack of connectivity back in this little hollow has me out of sorts this morning. Yesterday was kind of disjointed, navigating around the freeways and byways of the metropolis of Omaha and basically failing at everything I tried. The defeat was so complete that I headed to the first plausible campground on the far side of town by the fastest route available, none of the usual “take the two-lane roads” shit, just take the quickest route on the interstate like the navigation app says, and get to a spot and chill.

So yesterday afternoon ended with crossing the Missouri into Iowa (Council Bluffs) and escaping Omaha on I-29 south. Drive twenty short freeway miles to US 34, drive two miles east, take a left on a gravel road five miles, and boom, I’m here. … Where exactly IS here? I didn’t notice the exit number, or the road I got on. I’m just “here”. So this morning I was much soothed to get to the main highway to get decent phone reception and determine where I was. Yelp sez that the oddly named town of Plattsmouth, NB is where I need to go.

The name kind of amused me. I’ve heard of Portsmouth and I’ve heard of Plattsburg, but Plattsmouth is a new one on me! Turns out it makes prefect sense – it’s the town at mouth of the Platte River!

As noted above I am on the Iowa side of the river, so I jog west a short while on US 34, cross but do not get on I-29, then jog south then west again to a bridge over the Missouri that turns out to be a very funky old toll bridge that looked like this. It was pretty funny – I was thinking WTF as I drove up to it and across it, but when I was on the Nebraska side the road took a sharp turn to the left and … there was a kiosk and a STOP sign. There was absolutely no signage before or during to give me a hint what was going on (that I saw), so I pulled over and this deadpan wizened old fellow says “$1.75”. So it’s a toll bridge! I had two ones, and he gave me back a quarter. He lightened up a bit then, like he was relieved that I didn’t give him a hard time. That was my “Welcome to Plattsmouth” moment. :)

Nonetheless I had a mostly excellent Plattsmouth experience. The downtown coffee place had the very odd name of Herban Coffee Lab. But their coffee and goodies and wifi and big solid tables and good lighting and nice people and peace and quiet were just the perfect antidote to the vague sense of dislocation that Omaha had inflicted on me.

The other place in town that Yelp says has wifi was a “German-Thai” restaurant that happens to be right across the street, I can see it through the window of the coffee shop. What the heck, as long as I am in a region full of Germans, might as well get me some German food! So I carted my laptop across the street, and … everything Yelp said was true except there was no wifi and no Germans! :(((  That’s annoying, but I’m still hungry, so I stay and order a bowl of mild chicken curry. It was ok but not awesome. To my taste buds they were using beef stock for the chicken meal. Maybe that’s a Nebraska thing. But it was a large enough mess o’ food that I only ate half, and took the remainder with side of rice for another day.

The Platte River has had a special place in my imagination ever since a road trip my mom in the late 60’s(?). We were driving to the Denver suburbs where her friends from WW2 Long Beach lived. We took I-80, which follows the Platte across the western half of Nebraska, in the aftermath of a pretty big flood. I remember detours on pontoons across the river because bridges were out, There was all kinds of devastation on Denver. Anyway, I want to get as close to the actual confluence as I can.

I tried the gravel road due east towards the Missouri. That took me through a pretty beat-up retirement community on the river, but there was no through road northward. So I backtracked across the railroad tracks to follow another road north towards the Platte. That eventually worked. Twelve miles of decent gravel road later I am at a wind-blown L&C marker for the confluence. Between the wind, and the glare of the sun, and the insects when I escaped the wind in the lee of the van it was not a place to hang out very long. But I did get there.

The mega-cool thing that happened on the way was that there was a turtle in the road. God how I love turtles! I stopped in the middle of the road (no traffic) and moved it to the grass on the side of the road. This brought back more old family memories, of picking up a turtle on a country road in Corydon Indiana on a family trip in the 80’s and keeping it! We called it Bob and kept if in a box and fed it lettuce all the way back to California. Bob Turtle stayed with us for years. I was very attached to Bob Turtle.

The easy way to get to Kansas City from here is hop back over the river and get on I-29. But that ain’t my style. I stay on the west side and follow US 75 south, then zig east on Neb 67 to stay even closer to the river. This eventually gets me to tonight’s destination, another of these farm town municipal campgrounds:

I get there with a couple of hours of daylight left and check the place out. As mentioned in the description there wasn’t any guidance about where to park if you’re not hooking up, but got the lay of the land so to speak and headed off to the library. ! I sure like spending time in small town libraries on these trips.

The main thing I wanted to do was make a reservation in Kansas City and research the scene there a little bit. I did that, then my usual mapping and googling and Flickring and blog updating. I felt productive and fulfilled in some small way when I left.

A short drive back to the park, pick a nice spot and settle in. It is perfectly pleasant sitting in my blue chair beside the van well into the evening. There aren’t very many bugs … new bugs that is. I still have my traveling crew of flies that I’m beginning to think I will have forever. It’s warm but not too warm, with a gentle breeze. Then the gentle breeze becomes a wind, and that storm that’s on the weather app radar is about to commence. It blew pretty good for most of the night, but never approached the sudden violence of the one in Elk Point a couple of nights ago.

Friday

Falls City turns out to be a pretty small place. There are a couple of chain restaurants on the highway at the edge of town, but the only brunch place in town was an old school local diner called the One Stop Cafe on a leafy street a block off the main drag. It was a real fun place to go, crusty waitresses that seem like they’ve been there forever, crusty old farmer dudes reading the local paper that seem like they’ve been sitting at that same table forever. However, my goto breakfast of sausage patty, scrambled eggs and hash browns was not awesome. The cook seemed to have dumped all the sausage grease in the pan on top of the hash browns. A little big of grease is the whole point, but this was far beyond my standards. I felt kinda lumpy well into the afternoon.

Today I’m driving to Kansas City. Unlike Omaha, which I had no particular commitment to seeing, I have a bucket list item in KC. I read about a cool new art museum (actually a cool new wing of an old museum) on the internet a few years ago. There were reviews in more than one magazine/website that it was a must-see place. That’s really about all I remembered: that it’s in KC and I should see it. Googling at the library it seemed that it the Kemper Museum must be the place. That was wrong as it turns out, but I didn’t know that yet.

Today’s piece of the Lewis & Clark Trail is some very pretty bottomland on the west (Kansas) side of the river. … some of it on the Iowa Tribal Reservation. It too me through a very scenic little town called White Cloud right on the river. There are state signs branding this area as Glacial Hills Country, which seems pretty funny to me. Apparently the soil here – loess – is Ice Age deposit from the receding glaciers. That explains the “Glacier” part of the name, but I’m just not seeing any hills. :)

Kansas Route 7 took my through the medium-sized town of Atchison. I feel like I’m passing through this part of the country too quickly. I always start hurrying and lose that stop and smell the roses vibe when I get near cities … So I made myself slow down and explore Atchison for a bit. I drove straight to the river to see what there is to see. I ran straight into a Benedictine College, which wasn’t too interesting but I bushwhacked my way south and eventually found the River Road, which surprise, is the road along the river. There was a lovely little park, and a very inviting little restaurant called the River Shack Grille which I was sorely tempted to settle into for a burger and a beer or two. The river is very high and fast right now, and I spent some time watching a fellow get his boat launched all by himself. I talked to him, he was cool.

The rest of the approach to KC was pretty easy. Traffic wasn’t bad on my side of the freeway, lucky me! By 4-ish I am at my shabby but cheap hotel:

It’s part of a low-budget hotel chain called Extended Stay America. They have another hotel near the museums I’m visiting that I would have MUCH preferred, but it was booked solid on Friday night. So I made do with this one. It’s eight miles south, a straight shot one Holmes Avenue from my freeway interchange. The best i can say about it is that it was a place to sleep and there were no parties next door.

Check in, have a drama with my card key not working because everything here is really beat up. After two trips back to the desk I eventually get settled, take a shower, then laze around watching Sportscenter and researching my evening. Apparently everybody gets their news from Fox in Kansas City (no MSNBC on the cable). No wonder the place has f—ed up politics. The museums are open til 9 pm on Friday (woo!), so around 6:30 I bestir myself to head downtown to get me some culture!