After yesterdays rain we woke up to a foggy, humid and warm morning. I walked out of the RV at 4:30am which was parked in front of the town fire station which was also 25 yards from the rail which Union Pacific ran all night. Surprisingly Chris and I slept through the deafening horn sounding at the crossing and the thunderous cars coming through.

Walking onto Main Street of this quaint little town felt surreal as the fog gave it a movie set feeling. I was really concerned about my feet which can blister very easily in that much rain as they get pruinee. But, I have become very proficient at taping and dealing with foot issues as i have been battling blisters since week 2 of the relaunch. Luckily no damage done today and anytime things don’t get worse, my view is it is getting better!

Looking at elevation every day I am realizing that we are slowly climbing each day on the plateau we are on. In Missouri and Kansas we were alway around 1,000 feet. The last few days in Nebraska I have seen roughly 100-200 feet of increase per day and we finished around 2,000 feet. This will continue into the “high plains” where elevation will get above 5,000 feet.

Early this morning leaving Glenvil, I was on a farm road running parallel to the rail. There was an inactive train that must have been a mile long. I approached the cross road where I needed to get to the other side of the track and the lights were flashing because the train was in the way. Nothing else to do in the dark than jump the train. As i walked across as luck would have it another train was coming from the other direction in the distance so while Lucky and I climbed over we watched another come barreling by us. Exhilarating and scary…

On the other side a few hundred yards up a rail worker, maybe the engineer was walking the train with a light in the dark and we saw each other, said hello and I asked why the inactivity. He griped that they had been stopped for a few hours already and wouldn’t get going for another 5 hours or so until the got more weight on the back of the train. I asked about the dirt road crossing and he shrugged his shoulders.

Good interview today with a few students in Hastings, NE which is famous for being the birth place of Kool-Aid they let me know.

Tomorrow we head for Kearney, NE which is another milestone for us as we have been heading northwest on our way to the Platte River where we will follow it as the pioneers did on the famous trails that all converged there: The Trappers Trail, The Oregon Trail, The California Trail, The Mormon Trail and The Pony Express Trail. This was the superhighway of its era and was known as “the grand corridor of America’s westward expansion.” Once in Kearney, we will take Wednesday off to get Lucky his treatment and catch up on laundry, cleaning, shopping, etc.

All for today - thank you for your ongoing support.

Cheers,

David.