Iowa and Beyond

I spent time in Iowa for the first time in my life yesterday.  To be precise, I spent somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes there.  That girl and I managed to drive through the bottom corner of Iowa where it adjoins both Kansas and Nebraska.

The bottom corner of Iowa is not particularly scenic or memorable in any manner.

Farmland for the most part.

Notably, however, we bridged-over the Missouri River one more time where it defines the border between Iowa and Nebraska.

For the rest of our drive, which ultimately landed us in Morrill, Nebraska, the landscape around us gradually shed trees and yielded to grass and tilled earth.  The sky expanded.  Clouds tore themselves apart, then began to billow higher.

We whisked by the world headquarters for Cabela’s in tiny Sidney, Nebraska.

In March of this year, some 700 employees were forced to leave Sidney or sever employment following a buyout of Cabela’s by Bass Pro.

The landscape changed more rapidly in the western half of Nebraska.  The flat to gently rolling terrain gave way to escarpments, weather-carved walls of stone, and shortgrass prairie.

I find these landscapes as handsome, though I suppose others may not.

I like a place where sky can jump from a cliff.

We ended a ten-hour drive in Merrill (at the very edge of Nebraska) and ate our supper in a shiny diner under sunset skies.

Today, we go for home.

--Mitchell Hegman