Road trip part 4: Ogallala - last stop before Colorado and where everything starts to get interesting....

After making it across Iowa and most of Nebraska without much to report, we were getting kind of desperate for entertainment.  And then along came a little place called Ogallala, on the edge of Nebraska before you get to Colorado.  The name itself entertained us for hours, as we childishly sang, "Ogallala" to the tune of 'Oklahoma' and then proceeded to see if we could play around with this strange word and make some other meaning out of it.  We tried seeing if the name could be used as an equivalent of the French, 'Oh la, la!' or as an expression of disgust, changing the stress in the word to see if that would fit.  Or, in traditional English humour (which I hate by the way) we turned it into a sort of innuendo word, and put the stress and rising intonation on the final 'la' of Ogallala' and much fun was had by all.

In the place itself, we stopped overnight at a Best Western motel and were greeted by the kind of salt-of-the-earth type staff who all spoke with a distinctly 'kind granny' type of American accent, all soft and soothing.  Our room was decorated with old country style wallpaper and dried flowers accordingly.  Totally not our style at all, but it was sweet nonetheless.  Like staying with a kindly relative whose life consists of writing cards and letters and meeting the deadline for post box collections and maybe making tea and coffee for the church coffee morning but not much else.

The cowboy nearly ruined this nice atmosphere by 'stealing' a couple of hard boiled eggs at breakfast and sneaking them out as we headed back to our room.  But the nice lady taking care of the breakfast area didn't notice and instead said, "You folks have a nice day!  Drive safe!".  It's such a Czech thing to try to get the most out of a 'free' breakfast though, so I had to just hope she wouldn't hold it against us if she noticed.  You can take the boy out of the communist country but you can't take the communist country out of the boy....

More free things awaited us just around the corner, and this time it was my kind of freebie - free coffee.  

We were headed for Denver that day but we stopped at the first rest stop across the border with Colorado and found there was a visitor's centre with free maps and leaflets and pensioners volunteering as visitor guides.  

Ah, little Julesburg visitor's centre, what a haven you were!  We also crossed the timeline and were now an hour behind Chicago, which meant we gained a bit of extra time that day to enjoy Denver more.  But before we set off, we got a fantastic bit of background info, a map and a 3D drawing of Colorado from the lovely people at the visitor's centre who outlined for us what the deal is with Colorado, i.e. that it's the same as Nebraska until you get to Boulder.  Then that's where the mountains begin and it's a whole different world after that.  

We wanted to get to Denver however, so we took all the maps and leaflets and finished our cups of coffee and headed off into the windy day to see how long it would take us to get down along the I-76 and into the centre of town.  It was most fortunate that we gained that hour because it meant that when we did reach Denver, we had time to go straight to the Zoo!  My favourite thing to do...

Denver Zoo was lovely and full of really amusing animal enclosures and fun information boards.  We had to see the hippos of course, but we also saw some cute meerkats, a few monkeys and lemurs,

a wild chipmonk running along the path at random, some penguins 

and sealions and some weird-looking fish.  

There were big statues of hippos too, and a conservation section with letters from school children about saving the environment (some of which were written in Spanish, which was cool!) 

And the giftshop had some gorgeous things, which I could have bought more of but couldn't afford...alas.  

At the end of our day, we found another Best Western motel and got the best room of the whole trip.  It was divided into sections, one bit with the bed and a desk and TV and the other bit through a door separating the two, a mini-lounge with another TV and a sofa and even another desk with a wheelie-chair!  Oh, and a free newspaper.  A writer's idea of heaven.  I could have stayed there all week...

Road Trip: Part 3: Hello Farm boy!

When we left the suburbs of north western Illinois, we had a bit of help to get to the interstate and negotiate the junctions by the fact that my parents decided to drive out to take us onto the I-88 in their mini-van.  My Dad was a bit jealous that we were getting to do this amazing trip, though he did admit, he would have been just as happy to be dropped down in Denver and go from there, rather than bothering to drive all the way through Iowa and Nebraska.  We waved goodbye to the friendly red mini-van at the junction for the I-80 and crossed the border into Iowa at about 4.30pm.  

Somewhere along the line, we really felt the sense of being on our own as we were driving along in our Nissan Altima, heading off into the sunset like all the best rambling, nomadic types do.  It felt right.  A bit lonely, a bit homeless, but somehow it was all right because this was the life of the trucker.  This is what it looked like:

There's a line in 'Star Trek : The Voyage Home' (no I'm not ashamed...) where Captain Kirk and the like end up in 1980s San Francisco and a woman he meets there asks him where he's from and when he replies, "Iowa", she says, " Oh, farm boy, huh?"  I never really knew anything about Iowa so I hadn't really thought about it much.  But as we made it there ourselves and all we ever saw out of the window was farmland, it clicked.  Yes, these are the plains.  (Well, when you reach Nebraska it's officially the plains.) 

Our first day ended just outside of Des Moines, when we called it a day and drove up to an Econolodge place and asked for a room.  It wasn't super-super cheap once you added on the tax, but it was a room.  And it had internet, albeit  quite a patchy signal.  And the guy at the reception desk made me laugh by the fact that he was astute enough to realise we weren't from the US, but not astute enough to distinguish my accent from that of a Russian speaker.  (Oops.  Bit further west mate..!)

Iowa and Nebraska looked like this:

And this: 

And this: 

Fascinating, huh?  No, we didn't think so either.  But the country radio was entertaining.  It had to be!  You can't survive out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do unless you have some silly nonsense songs to sing along to, right?  So in Iowa, we got lyrics like, "Where I come from there's corn bread and chicken, where I come from you gotta make a livin'" and on Nebraska's 93.1 "The River" country radio, we heard the delightful, "I want you to love me like my dog does Baby...he never says I wish you made more money...he don't get mad and throw a major fit when I say his sister is a bitch" [Billy Currington] and , "Am I the only one who wants to have fun? Is there anybody out there wants to have a cold beer, hang out til the mornin' light if I have to raise hell all by myself I will, but y'all know that ain't right get your good time on, let's have a good time tonight"  [Dierks Bentley]

Can you sense the desperation for connection with another human being in that last one?  When you're driving in the middle of Nebraska and all you can see is this

it all becomes clear.  There ain't no-one out here but farmers and cattle.  One's soul starts crying out, not for civilisation because that's long gone, but just the simple delight of a beer and a conversation with someone.  And I don't even like beer.