Omaha, NE

Trip miles 7581
Daily miles 723

After the lake Fitznomad and I reached Route 24 and took it northbound towards I-70. We passed through an interesting town called Leadville, presumably named for the product it was extracting from the mountains. The town looked a bit like some of the towns in Texas, but certainly more cheerful; I don't recall hearing any chainsaws either for that matter...

Note the mural depicting pioneers on the building to the left.

I imagine that if you live there you must grow excellent lungs...

We took the opportunity to tank the car in Leadville which ended up causing us all sorts of unnecessary consternation. Here's what happened. When the car was up in Independence Pass all of its components got cold. Then, we descended 2,000 feet and parked the car at the gas station in warm sunshine for a bit. Water condensed on the cold parts of the catalytic converters, so that we when we restarted the car the 'Check Engine' light came on and there were warning about the cats flashing on the console. Of course we didn't know why this happened at the time, only that the dashboard started to resemble a Christmas Tree, with far more yellow lights than green...

Obviously we were very concerned about this and were about to drive to a dealer in Denver to ask them to check it out. Luckily I called beforehand and one of the people there explained that the situation was probably nothing and that the problem would go away once the water evaporated.

Fitznomad was driving and I was dealing with the dealer so we didn't take too many pictures during this time. Here's a decent one nonetheless.

By the time we got to I-70 I had spoken to the dealer and most of my concerns had been allayed, so I was able to resume picture taking duties.

The check cat and engine lights were on until we reached the plains of East Colorado, so we were both somewhat stressed about it for a good 2 hours or so.

Anyway, we passed Vail.

I was amazed that this ski resport was so close to an interstate highway. Off the top of my head I can't think of any place that is similar. Park City in Utah is certainly closer to a major airport but you still have to drive through mountain roads to get there.

The sights were truly spectacular.

We passed through an interesting tunnel. It was pretty long and quite noisy.

I knew in the back of my mind that at some point the great scenery would end and we would enter the plains of the Eastern US. Indeed, the landscape changed soon after we exited the tunnel, and we could see the flatlands ahead.

The ground became very flat very quickly once we reached Denver. We took I-76 northeast towards Nebraska.

There really wasn't that much to see along the way. We did meet a cool county sheriff when we stopped for gas somewhere around the time we took this picture. He was a friendly smiling man packing an extremely large handgun and a sheriff's badge on his belt. He seemed genuinely pleased to see out of towners.

We did see signs for exotic sounding locales.


One of the more interesting sights was a rancher using a helicopter to survey his property.

I-76 joins I-80 in Nebraska. Nebraska is quite flat and pretty featureless, but every now and again you do see something interesting. This came upon us in the middle of nowhere.

It was very the largest object around for miles.

We also saw the Heritage Military Vehicle Museum.


And signs for other attractions as well.


By and large the landscape was pretty empty all the way to Omaha. At one point it was scarily empty when we pulled into a Shell gas station that had been hit by (I presume) a tornado. It was deserted and there were pieces of the station all over the place. It was very reminiscent of the town in Texas that I drove through earlier that had similar sorts of debris scattered around. It was spooky and we got out of there as quickly as possible.

It was completely dark by the time we got to Omaha, and I felt a sense of relief that one of the most remote parts of the trip was behind us.