Day 124 - Driving through Nebraska, NE

After a lazy morning waiting for the tent to dry out from the morning dew (or at least that was our excuse), we packed up and headed back on the road. We both had a number of bites from the night before after becoming dinner for the local bugs and this morning wasn't any better, there were hundreds of flies around. They were annoying whilst we were trying to put the tent away but we were in for a shock when we jumped into the car to find 50 of them waiting for us inside! We decided to hit the road anyway and hope they would leave us en-route. We had all the windows down trying to chase them out as best we could but it took hours for them all to leave. We even arrived at our hotel for the night with a few still buzzing around inside the car.

Our plan today was to continue crossing Nebraska until we reached the Iowa border where we were going to stay in Sioux City. The journey felt long but that was because there wasn't much to see. We drove through lots of farmland with the occasional farm with a grain store.
 

We stopped off in the town of Broken Arrow for gas and to clean some of the dead bugs off the window (these are the smears in some of our photos!) and then continued through the corn fields to one of the biggest cities in Nebraska, Grand Island.

We didn’t go into this city, instead we skirted around the outside wanting to get as close to Sioux City as we could before lunch. The outskirts of Grand Island didn’t feel like the usual outskirts of a large city, it felt more like a small farming community and guess what, there were a lot of corn fields!

We were surprised that throughout our trip we haven't seen that many trains in the US but Nebraska was different, we saw a lot! The tracks ran parallel to the road and every 10 minutes we saw a cargo train going past. Most seemed to be building materials although I’m sure one or two must have been carrying corn. In the UK, we rely heavily on the train. For work and even for pleasure, if we're going to travel anywhere outside of our home town, we would first consider the train and only if it was inconvenient would we use the car instead. In the US, train travel seems to be common in some big cities on the East Coast (such as New York and Washington DC) but on the whole, is not widely used. Someone told us this was because distance trains are unreliable, with train companies giving preference to freight trains where the money is made.

During our time in Nebraska we saw a lot of corn stores and with very little else to look at, we started to get really excited by these stores. We probably have far too many pictures of them but it sums up the most exciting parts of our journey through this state.

We picked up Highway 81 which took us through some bigger towns including Norfolk where we saw some people and shops, including shops selling the watering machines we'd seen often in the fields of corn.

Not what we expected to see in the Plains

 

After a few more miles of corn fields and small towns, including Jackson with a population of 205, we finally reached the Iowa border and headed into Sioux City.

Normally when we enter into a city, we are on a busy Interstate and surrounded by high rises and factory buildings. Coming into Sioux City, we were surrounded by corn fields and farms but we were surprised to learn that farming is not the main industry in this city. It is actually known as the Construction City. Thanks to Tanisha Adamson for putting us straight on this and also being a lovely waitress in Buffalo Wild Wings.

We arrived at our hotel on the outskirts of Sioux City, the Hampton Inn. The hotel was a lovely hotel. It looked new, was super clean with friendly staff and a huge room. It was a shame we were only staying for 1 night. We had a couple of hours doing some washing in the complementary (but you still needed to pay) laundry room and updated the blog before deciding we needed some food.

We had planned to go to downtown Sioux City but it was going to be a $12 Uber each way and looking at Google Maps, there wasn’t a huge amount to see. So instead we walked across the road to a shopping mall where there were a couple of restaurants including Buffalo Wild Wings. Lee had done such a good job driving today in very boring conditions that I had to let him have his favourite meal in the US, wings!