Wide Open Spaces!

After our pleasant night at the Pioneer Village campground, we headed off toward Wyoming. However, when we got back onto I-80 and came to the town of Kearney, NE, we were amazed to drive under a GIANT covered archway that spanned the whole interstate highway! We took the next exit and drove back to see what that was all about.

Kearney Archway Museum sits across I-80

It was the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, memorializing the contributions of Nebraska and the Platte River to western expansion. This was impressive. A sculpture garden and maze surrounds the building and inside the arch is an interactive museum depicting the history of this part of the west. It's a beautiful log and stone structure. We watched an informative movie about the early pioneers of the area--many things were quite different from what we had thought! We looked around inside and outside for awhile. From the outside, a bridge goes across the Platte River to a public bike trail. Nearby is an earth mound which we walked over to scrutinize more closely. It's an authentic Pawnee lodge built not too long ago by a group of Pawnee. The inside is much more impressive than the outside. It's huge, very nice and cool despite the 90+ temps outside, and can house 15 or 20 people, with bed structures all along the circular wall. Neat!

Carol with giant buffalo sculpture

Inside the archway

 Pawnee lodge

Back on the road after spending a couple hours on this sidebar. Continuing our policy of frequent stops to walk around, we learned that Nebraska had commissioned 10 sculptures for some of their rest stops across the state in a big competition back in the 1970s, for America's Bicentennial. They turned out to be controversial because they're all very modern and abstract, and none of the 10 winners of the competition were from Nebraska, or even from the Midwest. Some are big granite carvings, that you can climb on, supposedly representing some aspect of Nebraska. We liked the metal floating wind sculpture.

Nebraska Wind Sculpture.

Nebraskan Gateway Sculpture

We didn't quite make it to Wyoming that day due to all these side trips. We decided to stay in a Walmart not too far from the Wyoming border. These Walmarts are turning out to be some of our favorite camping spots on this trip. We're much more comfortable staying at them this time than on past trips, for some reason. We always ask permission and ask where they'd like us to park, which is always on the far outskirts of the parking lot. We can run our generator without bothering anyone, and our new battery works a lot better than the old one did, so we can keep our lights and fan on all night without running out of juice. It 's nice having the store right there for picking up whatever we need, and best of all the price is right!! Other RVers (and truckers) are always there too, spending the night.

Next morning we finally made it to Wyoming. Yay! We got our first glimpse of the Rockies, always a cool feature of these cross-country drives, and our first sighting of pronghorn antelopes. We stopped at a rest stop between Cheyenne and Laramie--Wyoming has the greatest rest stops! This one is next to a park dedicated to the old Lincoln Highway (did you know we had a coast-to-coast highway in 1913?!). It has a lovely visitor center and an impressive, giant statue of Lincoln outside, commemorating the highest point on the old highway--we're at about 8,000 ft. Happy to be here.

Photo just before entering the rest stop pavilion. 

Lincoln Sculpture in background, RoadTrek in foreground. (Another older couple in a RoadTrek parked next to us. They were on their way from AZ to Cape Cod, MA. They love their RoadTrek too.)

View of the Lincoln Sculpture from inside.

Carol gazing at the wide open spaces.

A full-sized stuffed grizzly bear. A 15.4 inch footprint is part of this display.

and two stuffed pronghorn antelope. Male lying down and female standing.

Can you believe this animal can hit 60 mph?

Even a newborn can outrun a human.

We love what this poster has to say.

Jack got into a little bit of trouble, but we made our getaway...

Carol just got some more book editing work and needed to install some software on her new computer in order to do it, so we decided to look for a motel for a night. We enjoyed watching the Olympics on TV and the motel was reasonable and comfortable, so we decided to stay yet another night. We're in the town of Rock Springs and currently getting ready to head to Utah to a campground on the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, as we await our rafting trip down the Green River in a few days.