Into Iowa

We’ve been lucky with the weather.  Yesterday it poured in this area.  Rain is forecast for tomorrow.  But today it was sunny and bright.  Windy, though.

The car has a wonderful GPS system, with easy-to-use maps.  But heading east in the early morning across across Nebraska, we found another good reason to carry paper maps.

We stopped in Lincoln to charge, and being a Saturday in the fall, everyone was wearing red and white, getting ready for the football game.  (The Cornhuskers played the Northwestern Wildcats today and suffered their six loss this season.)

We haven’t seen much fall color.  With all the rain, the grass is still green.  And with no freeze yet most of the trees are still green, although it is a tired, dull green without the vibrancy of spring or richness of summer.

We reached the charger in Council Bluffs, Iowa at noon and had a wonderful lunch with a cousin of Andrea’s and his wife who had driven two hours south to meet us.  The timing of our trip wasn’t right for us to visit them at their home, so this was like a special bonus.

Interstate 80 across Nebraska follows the Platte River and is very flat.  Iowa is hillier.  Except for the one with the map, all the pictures today were taken in Iowa.

We stopped in the tiny, struggling town of Casey, Iowa, just to see what was there.  It has definitely seen better days, although evidently they still haul corn to the elevator by the railroad tracks.

We are in West Des Moines tonight.  Tomorrow we will head north through the center of Iowa to Minnesota and the Minneapolis-St Paul metropolis.