Cptnrydr - Road Trip 2009 - part 2
July 6th
Grand Isle, NE
Sunny, 74 degrees, calm winds
- Start time 8am, humidity low, no clouds in the sky, as we started up Hwy 2.
- Saw first of many, many, many trains along this highway almost immediately. The BNSF railroad runs continuous rail traffic almost exclusively “coal trains” with over 120+ cars and 3 engines. I gave a “pull down motion with my arm” and most of the engineers tooted their horn. Many probably have not seen a Spyder before!
- Hwy 2 is fantastic to ride, we saw less than a dozen semi-trailers the whole 300 mile day and hardly any traffic, so we sometimes rode side-by-side on the two lane road chatting and taking each other’s pictures.
- Lunch was a quick detour to the Nebraska National Forest! 322,000 acres of hand planted / sowed pines surrounded by the Sandhills of Nebraska.
- Sandhills are vast, vast rolling dunes of sand mostly covered with grasses now, consolidated into large ranches. Ted Turner owns a lot of this land. Water table must be pretty close to the ground, as there are hundreds of windmills on the grassy landscape. Saw a few solar powered.
- Met Ira McCulup and Tyson Donovan, on one of our rest breaks. “What do people do around here?” was the question. These two are on the rodeo circuit, 22 stops in July alone. “It’s $100/day as a ranch hand or make triple that for 8 seconds”, says Ira.
- By the way, if you’re thirsty, just go out to one of those windmills turning and get as much water as you want, Ira says “ranchers don’t care, as people have to help each other out here.”
- Trains still coming by (about every 20 minutes) says Tyson. That’s a lot of coal.
- Ice cream at Alliance, NE before we headed to Crawford, NE and Ft Robinson, NE our next stop.
- As we moved northwest on the road we see thunderheads building on the Wyoming / Nebraska line…. We could get wet before we make our stop. Scenery is changing to some bluffs and pines now and the vistas are awesome.
- Arrival at Ft. Robinson, NE at 4:48 mountain time, (gained an hour). Thunderstorms about to dump rain on us but we are safely here. Temperature has dropped back to 70’s as downdraft winds start blowing.
- We ate dinner at officers mess hall and then watched it rain from the large wooden porch of the old Officers Barracks where we’ll spend the night.
Travelled 353 miles in 6.2 engine hours.
Nebraska National Forest.....
Officer's Barracks at Ft. Robinson, From the porch we watched it rain into the night, just barely making it safely there before it thunderstormed.
