Corn Soy Corn Soy Cow!

May 29, 2024 – Day 75

Victoria Springs State Park, Anselmo Nebraska – Lake Manawa State Park, Council Bluffs, Iowa

Paul had gotten on the various Facebook groups for our brand of RV and they helped him debug the hydraulic issue. Bad solenoid? Nope. Low fluid? Not that either. He got out there with the volt-meter and learned… nothing. Eventually the Facebook brain trust suggested something else, could the grounding be bad? He undid the bolts that attach the hydraulic system to the RV, re-tightened them. Lo and behold it worked again! What happened is that the hydraulic bay is right behind the driver’s side tire. Road spray and debris can get up there and it messes with the bolts. We’re both glad it was an easy fix.

That debugging took awhile. It was important to fix. We have a good chunk of driving left. If we can’t extend half the house life gets really inconvenient. By now we were past checkout time but we weren’t being hassled by the camp host. We lunched and packed up our stuff to get ready for the next leg of driving.

We’re just heading east at this point trying to get to the outskirts of Riverside Iowa. The plan was to make it to Lake Manawa State Park just outside of Omaha. We’d reserve a pull through site, not unhook and head out early the next day. [suspenseful music plays]

Leaving town, we saw another cute, but very small downtown area.

Corn is big out here. This lead our friend Jay to comment, “Nebraska: corn… soy… corn… soy… corn… soy… COW!… corn… soy… corn…soy…” We saw lots of silos.

And more trains.

And train track repair equipment.

There were about half a dozen different types of machines we saw that day, some had piles or railroad ties, one was a grader that smoothed out the stone, the final one even appeared to be cleaning the track, presumably of stone that stayed on the rails.

We passed through the cute town of Broken Bow. (susan here: they’re all cute and little and pretty much carbon copies of each other.)

Broken Bow is know for hosting the Boneyard Creation Museum.

The Boneyard Creation Museum is a non-profit educational museum located in Broken Bow, Nebraska for the purpose of displaying scientific evidence for creation and showing the difference between evolution and creation.

The “scientific evidence for creation,” hmmm, we’ll just leave it at that.

We had to pass big tractors. This was surprisingly easy.

And we picked up a big chip in the windshield, we’ll have to get that taken care of before it becomes bigger. Susan called around and found a shop that said they had a bay big enough for us. We booked an early morning appointment the next day.

And finally, we got the shot. I-80 closes a lot because of weather, usually it’s snow. All the entrance ramps have big gates on them!

And this is what happens when you open a carbonated beverage that you purchase at 8,000 feet and opened at 2,000 feet. It spurted for a few minutes, long enough to find a phone and snap the picture.

Hmmm, Lake Manawa State Park has 2 circles, not one. More Suspenseful music plays.

Daily: 234

Total: 6,216

Driving Miles/Day: 230

Overall Miles/Day: 83