Vacation: Kearney, Nebraska

We drove to Colorado on vacation.  I had originally planned to bring my bicycle, but my wife swapped cars with my father in law, and I wasn't willing to put the first scratches on his new SUV with my bones rack.  Some day I'll have to get back out there with my bike, or fly in and rent one, and bike the trail between Vail and Breckenridge.  It's probably more just coasting, but it looked like a lot of fun (it was pouring as we came down the mountain, so that part wouldn't have been any fun).

On the way out we stopped at the halfway mark around Kearney, Nebraska.  My wife wanted to check out the Great Platte Archway, a pioneering museum that crosses the interstate and looks like it might have once been one of those commercial places that span highways.  Unfortunately, we rolled in with only an hour or so to spare on Saturday night and decided to wait until the next morning when it was supposed to open at 9 a.m. or so according to AAA.  But the Great Platte Archway doesn't read AAA, and didn't open until noon.  Well past our timeline for moseying on to Denver.  Instead, we just wandered around outside.  A number of other folks were using the AAA guidebook as well and were there with us, staring at the closed building.

I wandered around the grounds picking up trash and checking out what we could see.  We were assured by one couple who was there three hours too early that they'd been there a decade before and it was wonderful.  Good to know.  So here are pictures of us doing pretty much nothing.

The museum itself is pretty cool looking.  There seem to be two floors up there, although it could just be a very open space.  Who's to say.


This is the horse atop the right hand tower.  It looks a little like a flying Blucifer from the Denver airport, which Eryn had us go out of our way to say on the nighttime trip home.  No light up eyes though - at least not during the daytime, or the daytime prior to noon opening hours.


Jen and Eryn did spend a lot of time feeding the fish.  Perhaps just to mock all the folks fishing who were required to stay at least 50 yards away from the bridge.  I bet it's harder to fish when all the fish go to the bridge to eat.  There's a trail from here through town.  Missed bicycling opportunity #1.


A maze that was also closed.  Eryn said she would have liked to try it.  I picked up some geotagged trash just to show we were there and didn't bother to get lost.


Fortunately, there was a statue I could touch inappropriately and almost no one around to frown at me for it.


Eryn and Jen checking out some of the native and pioneer buildings near the museum along the bike path.  Jen thought that was a bunny hutch, but if it was, then you put the bunnies in and force them through the bottom until the chaff is out of the bunnies.  Maybe pioneers did that sort of things.  I can't really say.  I was more a Tudor/Stuart history guy.


Eryn looking like she just finished up a pioneer rap song.  Here I be, in my lean too teepee, You might think it's the funnies, but I'm all about chaffing bunnies. Word.


There's a big area inside this mound where you can get a lecture during open hours.  My best picture is actually the litterati picture I took from inside the Pawnee Hidatsa Lodge.  No set up - I try never to move the trash unless it's merely to flip it over to see who produced it.


And the wire bison.  These kept my wife busy for 20 minutes or so.  I bet she has a few hundred pictures on her camera.  I'm glad I don't have to sort them.  I took two - one of them I permanently deleted because it was a lot like the other one.  Go figure.  That was Kearney.  We stopped on the way back as well, but only long enough to grab breakfast at Perkins while we waited for the sun to come up because I was getting tired after driving all night.  I'm glad we hit the halfway point on the way out - straight through in a car was too much.