posted a day late due to not being able to get to the interenet last night... posted while we are stopped at an Iowa rest area due to heavy rain.
We shall never speak of this day again. It shall be removed from the records of history and cease to exist!!
We woke up a little before 7 in Park City today and checked the road report. Large portions of I-80 through Wyoming were closed. Updated just after 7, there were a few more. So Rachel rolled over and decided we’d check again around 9 or so to see if it’s just because it’s early morning. So, me, unable to sleep- did some internet. And around 8, I found out that all of I-80 was open and that there wasn’t supposed to be any inclement weather. I let Rachel sleep till the alarm and we got on the road around 9:45am.
That’s a pretty late start time, however, we did about 150 miles extra on Thursday, so we can wait a little. However, getting into Wyoming turned out to be the worst thing one could imagine!! The weather was a little shaky as we crossed from Utah into Wyoming and through nothing collected on the road, it slowed traffic. We got past that finally, but not before we hit 2 traffic jams, one which seemed to have no purpose and one that was because of an accident. But, we’re in the middle of nowhere- the “no reason” jam was so infuriating!! At one point, we’d done like… 200 miles in 5 hours!! Crazy!!
By the end of the state, we had hit 6 jams- with only 2 accidents and 4 seemingly reasonless. But what was bothersome on top of that were the tractor trailers. I felt almost run off the road a few times, have never used the horn more in one day before in my life and found them to be passing other tractor trailers by barely crawling by them. It happened so much and I was getting really frustrated! At one point, I even annoyed Rachel because of my muttering about the other drivers around me. We had already started late, lost a lot of time in jams and then they weren’t even allowing me to go the speed limit!!
It was so much that I almost missed a lot of the beauty of the state. I realized, however, that I had glorified Wyoming the last time I drove through. It has a lot of mountains and a LOT of beautiful stuff, but it’s still pretty bare- and 400 mile state to drive through!! And, due to the storm, everything was totally covered in snow. It was really quite beautiful.
As the day drew on, we moved our destination from North Platte, NE to just getting into Nebraska!! But, the skies cleared, the traffic thinned (thanks to no accidents or jams) and we began to make some better time. We came down out of the Rockies into Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital. And we kept going and hit Nebraska. We thought we’d shoot for Sidney, where we stopped in Nebraska on our way West, but we passed it, still feeling in good shape and the sun not quite down yet.
We decided to shoot for Big Springs, NE- another 50 miles or so. When we got here, we found only a Motel 6 (and as I tried to connect, I found that they open their access to all the truckers who stop too, and so I, who am paying for a room, lose out because someone else who isn’t paying connected first. Actually, apparently a LOT of truckers and other connected before me- so I can’t get internet. A rough end to a VERY rough day.
Final statistics for the day:
miles, 550
time- 9 hours
Times I wanted to scream- more than a dozen!
Times Rachel and I just laughed- a couple dozen
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