Ogallala, Nebraska, to Omaha, Nebraska
Day 3 driving time: 4 hours 45 minutes, with no stops
Nebraska Facts:
Nickname: The Cornhusker State
Largest City: Omaha, pop. 438,646 (also the largest city we’ve encountered on our trip, including the one we started in)
Nebraska is the home of the very first Cabela’s store in Sidney, Nebraska.
Omaha is the location of Winter Quarters, the staging area for the westward migration of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the Salt Lake Valley. It reminded me that I-80 runs roughly along the Mormon Trail about which I read so much during the time we lived in Utah.
The Henry Doorly Zoo here in Omaha has the largest indoor rain forest in the United States. On the advice of friends who’ve made the trek from Utah to Michigan multiple times, we added the zoo to our itinerary and rushed through our road trip (not even stopping to use the restroom) in order to have at least two hours at the zoo before closing time.
Based on the other parts of the zoo we saw, I was skeptical about how great the Lied Jungle would be. I mean, they had penguins in the same exhibit as the giraffes, and one of the selling points of the zoo is an IMAX theater. And the whole place has a kind of odd, aging Disneyworld feel to it, exacerbated by the geodesic dome that houses the desert exhibit. I worried it was one of “those” zoos, devoted more to entertainment than to conservation and education.When I saw the outside of the Lied Jungle building, I felt my heart sink even more. It just looked dinky and rectangular and boring. But I trusted that my friend wouldn’t have led us astray, and it had started raining as we left the giraffes, so we headed in.
I don’t know how they did it, but that exhibit just kept going and going and going. Starting at the top of the forest and working our way down to the “Jungle Trail” on the forest floor, we traveled through areas highlighting the rain forests of Asia, Africa, and South America. We saw baby gibbons and pygmy hippos and slow lorises, vampire bats and pythons and gigantic Amazonian fish. There were waterfalls and mangrove trees (which I’m pretty sure were fake, but which were really awesome anyway). We could have spent all day there had we arrived earlier and had we not skipped lunch in order to get there when we did.
During the drive today, the little guy slept a good chunk of the way, and our daughter listened to Little House in the Big Woods. The scent of freshly mown grass periodically suffused the interior of the car and brought a smile to my face.
I munched wasabi peas and looked out the window a lot and noted how much Nebraska looks like Ohio. There was lots and lots of farmland. Farmland on rolling hills, farmland on flat land, farmland stretching as far as the eye could see. What struck me was that, originally, the landscape of Ohio was quite different from that of Nebraska. Eastern Nebraska was covered with 6- to 9-foot-high tallgrass prairie, while it was said of Ohio that a squirrel could go from one end of the state to the other without ever touching the ground, it was so densely wooded. And yet both states have been changed so much by their inhabitants, they look remarkably similar today.
The land might look the same, but the accent’s different. Nebraska’s shares some of Ohio’s expansive vowels, but it retains a twang that shows we’re still in the West. We’re crossing the Mississippi tomorrow, though, and saying farewell to the West for the foreseeable future.
Imperfect Happiness 