Nebraska - Day 10 - south to Grand Island

Grand Island KOA, Doniphan

Monday, 10 October 2022

today's route

We retraced some of our previous drive to get here, except this time I used all paved roads.  Despite what Google believes, it's just as fast for me to make a detour for pavements as it is to slow down to 5 mph or so on gravel to keep from bouncing everything in the cabin apart, including us.

On the radio I heard a bird watcher type list hints for helping backyard birds overwinter.  (1) Don't rake leaves, because bugs live underneath them and birds eat bugs.  (2) Don't deadhead your flower garden, because birds will eat the seeds in the dead heads all winter.  (3) Do make hotels for insects - but for the specifics you'll have to do your own research because the radio reception cut out at this point.  Anyway, I was glad to hear the less gardening work I do, the better it is for the birds.

After passing through Columbus, where those bell towers are, I was on roads I hadn't seen before.  We turned onto US-30, designated the Lincoln Highway Nebraska Byway.  This is part of the coast-to-coast highway I've come across in other states, with the concept first floated in 1915.

We stopped for a break at Clarks, pop. 369.  We all needed to stretch our legs, I glimpsed a park between some buildings as we drove down the road, and we drove around the small town until we found it so Dext could take a short walk.  Nice little town.  (The town's name does have the "s" tacked on; I checked.)

We saw a lot of train traffic today.  While we were stopped at Clarks, 2 trains went through town, and then we passed another with dozens of tanker cars and grain cars.

I realized during the drive that my "check engine" light has never come back on.  So I guess the combination of that repair guy cleaning out those 2 spark plugs followed by that spurt of high speed (for me) driving on the highway the next day did the trick.

All day I passed huge piles of grain.

We came to the city of Grand Island, pop. 53,151, "Home of the Nebraska State Fair."  The name Grand Island comes from early French fur trappers who called an island in the nearby Platte River "La Grande Île" ("big island"), and I guess the name got transferred to the town when it was established in 1857.

I stopped off at the CVS here and got my current version of the covid booster plus this year's flu shot.  I feel better with the extra protection, since flu season is coming right up and covid cases still seem to be with us (about 68,000 new confirmed cases every day in the US, believe it or not).

I found a city park near the CVS and stopped for Dext to walk around.  We stumbled on something called Tornado Hill.  This is surely a feature that's unique in the US: a park constructed around a hill that was created from the debris of 7 tornadoes that hit the Grand Island area all within 3 hours of each other.  Here's the historical marker about the event.

And here's the hill itself.

You can see it's a pretty high hill, and it undoubtedly covers a lot of debris.  That would have been a scary event to live through.

Heading from town to the campground 5 miles away, we passed the entrance to the Mormon Island State Recreation Area.  The park says it was named for the winter stopover at that place that was used by Mormon emigrants heading west.

And from there we went to the KOA, where we have a reservation for the next 4 nights.