WYOMING!

I am just about to cross into Wyoming. The license plates on the cars are getting mixed more and more between Nebraska and Wyoming, so I know I'm almost there. I've really blown through Nebraska over the past 5 days. I"ve been doing 100 mile days! I go about the same amount of hours but since it's been so flat I just cruise right along and get more miles done. Be amazed! I sure am.

I've had to deal with a couple flat tires this past week due to a small hole in my tire that keeps letting small rocks and glass from the road puncture my inner tubes. But I reinforced that area with a patch and that's worked so far so good over the past 2 days. Keeping my fingers crossed. Nebraskans are big on self-reliance I'm finding, and no one stopped to ask if I needed help the other day when I was fixing my tube--while in Missouri just about 5 different cars stopped to ask if I needed help when I had a flat there.

But other than making me do everything myself without any moral support, Nebraska has been actually my favorite state so far. Leaving Lincoln I went to Grand Island where I stayed at a great county campground. I had to leave Lincoln on highway 34--little did I know, having not looked at a more detailed map, silly me, 34 runs concurrent with Interstate 180 for about 3 miles. Soooo...I'm cruisin along and I get pulled over by a cop. I had a feeling I was not on the best road, but kept telling myslef I'd been on freeways before, I'm fine if I'm on the shoulder...and there was no "bikes/pedestrians prohibited" sign...but after honestly telling the cop I didn't mean to be on the Interstate, he told me I had two choices: either he could fine me, confiscate my bike and throw me in jail for 2 weeks while I figured out my route OR we could put my bike in his trunk and he could drive me up the road until I got to the non-Interstate part of 34. My heart skipped a beat when he described that first option--though I knew I wasn't in trouble, for a split second I wondered if the seriousness in which the cop said "fine" and "confiscate" and "throw in jail" meant I actually was. But he was a friendly guy who just had a great dead pan...a GREAT dead pan.

So he drove me up the road and when he pulled over to let me out I tried to get out of the backseat like in a normal car, and he asked, "Haven't been in a cop car before?" and that was pretty funny.

So a great beginning to the day.

After Grand Island I pedaled along to Lexington, Nebraska where I stayed with a WarmShowers.org host names Bryan. He worked the night shift at an ethanol plant so he let me have the house to myself and I drank a lot of his root beer in the fridge. When he got home at 8 in the morning he took me out to breakfast and gave me a tour of the ethanol plant which was absolutely fascinating. At points along the road there were different smells correlating to different industries in the town: the Tyson Chicken plant's incinerator (fried grease), the ethanol plant (sweet alcohol), the waste treatment facility (the bathroom of a dirty gas station)...I'll write more about Lexington later because I really learned a lot there and thought it was so cool that Bryan took it upon himself to show me the plant and the town.

After Lexington I made it to just outside Ogallala, Nebraska to an unincorporated town called Roscoe. I stayed with my favorite campground hosts, Bonnie and Greg Johnson--though they actually are in a close tie with Barb and Don at Pershing State Park in Missouri who saved me from a raccoon (more on that later). Bonnie made me a fantastic breakfast with homemade apple butter on toast, and set me up with a huge bag of her own dehydrated fruit (including pineapple) which I have been enjoying ever since. Bonnie and my politics clashed but it was all in good spirit and we really could have talked all day about Hillary Clinton, my liberal New Yorker father, and how hunters and farmers are the true environmentalists. Oh man, that conversation got me through the whole day while I was biking, thinking about my responses to her comments and why I believe what I believe. We did agree on this: rural america has much to offer the entire nation...and that is a definite truth.

Nebraska is beautiful and scenic and the land is something like I've never experienced before. The grasses are gold and white and green and yellow-green, and the handful of trees are the deepest forest green. There are hills and sandy bluffs, which I still don't know what that means, but I'm gonna look it up. And the sky is big and blue. It's amazihng.

Last night I met two Tejanos, Mexican-Americans who live in Texas, but they migrate to Nebraska every year to work the fields up here, sugar beets, corn, and wheat. They do back-breaking work for three months--and generations of their family have been doing the same since the 1950s, coming to the same town of Bridgeport. Eleuteno and Orelia Guerrero are their names and they invited me to come down to Texas and visit them on my next vacation and gave me their address. I'm planning on it. They lived at the motel I stayed at last night.

So Nebraska! It's been a great experience here and I'll plan on writing more about it probably when I get back to DC.

Love to all--Amelia