I leave on Monday for Phuket, Thailand. This is a video illustrating what I am leaving. [View Full Entry]

---

---

Big trip. Full day with a stop in the Agate Fossil Beds National Park. Nothing special. Grande viagem. Dia inteiro com uma paragem no parque nacional Agate Fossil Beds. Nada de especial. [View Full Entry]

---

---

Outside a small portion of the country, basically centered on Nebraska, no one has heard of the runza. For me, the food is considered a birthright. I mentioned in a previous post my love for runzas, especially the homemade ones my mother would frequently make. A runza is essentially a roll of cooked dough with beef and cabbage inside it. There are variations of the runza, which include switching the beef with pork, the cabbage with vegetable bits or no vegetables at all, adding mushrooms and swiss cheese, etc. The absolute requirements of the runza include the dough and the meat [View Full Entry]

---

---

This was our last day in Nebraska. We had traveled back and forth on many of it's scenic trails during the past few days. We returned to Scott's Bluff National Monument this morning to take the road to the top. It had been closed when we were there last evening. Today's starting temp was 70 F and the skies were absolutely clear blue so the view from the top of the monument was spectacular. I took many photos from the top and at the base of the bluff. As I looked out across the plains and the site of the original [View Full Entry]

---

---

We left Alliance at 9:45am and the plan for the day was to follow several of Nebraskas scenic routes including part of the Oregon Trail. The temp was 60 F first thing in the morning and would rise to a high of 84 F for the day. The skies were incredibly hazy for most of the day. According to the Weather Channel, it was caused by the fires in California and Colorado. When we first left Alliance we were still on Box Butte and so the ground was very flat but quickly changed and we were once again into the sand [View Full Entry]

---

---

Our hotel last night was a Super 8 in York. We left at 9:40am this morning, took I 80 to Route 14 and made a stop at the Plainsman Museum in Aurora. It was interesting to see the old school house, pioneer home and blacksmith shop from a bygone era. Aurora is also the home of Dr Harold Edgerton, inventor of flash photography and the strobe light. At the beginning of the day we passed miles of corn fields. Our starting temp was 60 degrees and rose to a high of 74, with fabulous blue skies. The air was fresh and [View Full Entry]

---

---

Wed stayed the night at a Super 8 hotel in Hannibal which by the way is the boyhood home of Mark Twain. The area between St Louis and Hannibal had been the prettiest part of the Great River Road. We left the hotel at 9:15am onto 36 west heading out of Missouri. The early morning temp was 54 but it had risen to 60 by 9am and there were the usual blue skies with puffy clouds. Route 36 is a 4 lane divided highway which traverses the northern 1/3 of the state. It took about 3 1/2 hours to cross Nebraska [View Full Entry]

---

---

We had a pretty good travel day and got ourselves into Grand Island Nebraska before I started hitting the rumble wakeup strips.... True road trip, Mel made us up some sandwhich's and we just motored away the miles, she kept me on track with paper maps (see "Notes" below...ugh) and fed tid bits on the states we are in. We got to see the Mississippi.... Yeap Kids Thats the Mississippi, The Mighty Miss - Ol'Man River..... (for you Lampoon lovers). Illionois was very Indiana but we really loved the rolling farm land of Iowa... hit the Norman Rockwell Romance button on [View Full Entry]

---

---

With this Monday being the week-away marker and this weekend being consumed by last visits to friends (though I will be coming back, I swear!), I'm finally starting to feel the pressure of getting ready to leave for the grand land of España. I'm dealing with things such as realizing my credit card expires in November, the headset I started shopping for at the beginning of the summer still hasn't gotten ordered, and I still need to buy that extra camera battery I keep telling myself I need. Oh yeah, and that whole packing for four months abroad thing. It's quite [View Full Entry]

---

---

28 June 2009 Sunday Although I once again planned to get up and get home early, it did not work out that way. I was tired in the morning and moved the alarm back an hour from my original plan. Then there was this movie on TV I didn’t wait for the end of it, but I watched way too much of it as I fixed the route to home. Carol told me to eat at the Bohemian Café on the way home so I needed to find it and plot a point to add it to my route. Carol had [View Full Entry]

---

---