Summer Road Trip: Days 1-3

As mentioned in the last post, Michelle and I are on a road trip! We haven't done one in a long time (actually I think the last one I blogged was 2013, not counting cons). And it's been a kind of fucked up year, so we wanted a vacation. I do think it's amusing, in a dark way, that we'd just booked our road-trip driving vacation when fucking Cheeto Mussolini went to war with Iran and drove gas prices up, but life's like that. It did move us to rent a hybrid, though. 

Everything's computer.

Tuesday

So we left on Tuesday, in our little space-age car that doesn't have keys and has a push-button starter that is completely silent so you can't tell if the damn car is running or not. (I am not a fan of many aspects of this.) We headed west, toward our first stop: Peru, Illinois. Our journey there was pretty uneventful, and we got our hotel and discovered we had time enough to have dinner and catch a movie!

There was a mall next to our hotel, and like many malls, about the only part of it still in operation was the theater. 

Michelle in the parking lot of the dying mall

We went and saw Backrooms, which was really good and kind of fucked me up (I'll talk about why some other time, but suffice it to say that I've been having nightmares about dark other-spaces since I was very young). And then we left the theater and:

shudder

So we went back to our room and watched Celebrity Jeopardy for a while.

Wednesday

Our stop on Wednesday was in Omaha, Nebraska. We got up early and had breakfast at Big Apple Cafe. I suspect that Big Apple was once a Stuckey's, it's the only explanation for this:

You have kind of zoom in to see what I'm talking about

The food was actually pretty good, though. I don't take pictures of my food, but I had a kind of hash that's best described as a small hillock of breakfast. 

The cafe had a bulletin board, which reinforced the general "liminal space" vibe of this town:

We stopped and got gas at a station with an...interesting sign:

Something I would not openly admit.

And then we got on the road and made pretty good time, and as we were driving through Iowa we came to West Branch. West Branch is the birthplace of Herbert Hoover and has the presidential museum and birthplace cabin, and is very much the sort of thing that Michelle and I stop to do while we're road-tripping.

Art.

Hoover-Ball is played with a freaking medicine ball. I'll stick to video games.

Michelle meeting the President

The birthplace cabin

Michelle in the birthplace cabin

Did you know Hoover's dad was a blacksmith? And he was a mining engineer?

And that due to his humanitarian efforts in Belgium, they gave him a statue of Isis wait what

A Quaker meetinghouse. I'm not religious, but I can get behind sitting quietly unless you've got something to say

So then, back on the road, as we had many miles to go before Omaha! But on the way to Omaha, we stopped in Des Moines, because if you're near Des Moines you might as well get dinner at...

ZOMBIE BURGER

I've been to Zombie Burger before. It's a zombie-themed restaurant, but their food is good and they make amazing shakes. Also, they really commit to the bit. 

So we had our brain-burgers and headed out to Omaha, and here's where our streak of hotel fuckery began. We were staying in the Aloft in Omaha, and I've generally had really good experiences there. Something should have clued me in that something was amiss when I got in the elevator:

There's only one reason they'd put this up.

And yeah, there were quite a lot of young boys in baseball uniforms around, but I didn't think anything of it. We got to our room, and immediately realized that the streaming wasn't working, which sucks because it's nice to be able to watch TV. Also, the air conditioning wasn't working, and that's a much bigger deal because one of the fun side effects of POTS is that it makes me really heat-sensitive. I called down about the TV, and was told "oh, yeah, forgot to tell you, streaming isn't working." But the AC still wasn't cooling the room off, and they couldn't really do anything about it, so they gave as a fan and basically said "you can try to get another room somewhere else, but everything is booked."

Yeah, turns out that Little Leaguers descend on Omaha every year. Who knew?

So we powered through as best we could, played Watergate (see previous post), and in the morning went in search of breakfast in Little Bohemia on the way to the zoo. 

Thursday

Little Bohemia is a fun little neighborhood in Omaha. Actually it reminds me quite a bit of Ohio City in Cleveland. First of all, they have strong feelings about their city's parking contracts:

Fuck Park Omaha, indeed

But we found a little coffee shop called Archetype, and oh my sainted aunt. I don't take pictures of my food, but I almost did here. Simple enough, breakfast sandwich with egg, cheese, bacon, hash brown, cream cheese, on a bagel. But the hash brown was garlicy and slightly spicy and not greasy, which is incredibly hard to pull off. Egg was hot and perfectly cooked, bagels are made in-house and were perfect, and the coffee was fucking amazing (and if you know me, you know I'm a snob about coffee). So that was a great start to the day. 

Sadly the Platypus Bar was closed

So from there, to the Omaha Zoo! Now, we went to this zoo back in 2013 and you can see the pics I took then in the link up above, so I took different pics this time. (I'm lying, I had no idea what pics I took the first time around.)

First we saw a presentation about birbs: 

Start of the birb show

Cockatoo!

Hornbill, on his way to snatch little wood discs away from people

Barn owl. "You fuckers know I'm nocturnal, right?"

Guinea fowl! These little dudes are fast

From there we explored the rest of the zoo, so here are some pictures:

Ook ook

Beautiful plumage.

I'M ENRICHED ALREADY. JUST GIMME THE LETTUCE.

Give me a fuckin' banana

Some kind of ape-birds? 

Evolution

HELLO FELLOW HUMANS I AM WEARING CLOTHES. LET ME OUT.

five more miiiiinutes

OK, did you read "Desert Dome" or "Desert Do Me"? No wrong answers.

Starling puffing itself up

Laugh, kookaburra

A pile of mustelids

LIZARD

Peccari, not a javelina. Really makes you oink.

JUNGLE CAT!

"Hello. Name's Bruce."

The elusive cheeto-fish

Shark!

We saw this guy while on the sky-tram. "Oh, it's those weird birds again. munch munch"

So from there, we left Omaha and drove to Olgallala, Nebraska, where the hotel fuckery continued. This time, the elevator only worked to the second floor. We were on the third. After walking around the zoo all day, walking up stairs with our suitcase was not what I was interested in doing.

It olny goes to the 2nd floor, you see

But at least the AC worked! We crashed out for the night, woke up, had a halfway decent breakfast at a local diner with some really shit coffee (but then, after Archetype anything is a hard sell), and got on the road to our next destination - Cheyenne, Wyoming!