Day 2: Sunday, May 13
Route: Lincoln, NE to Louisville, CO
Distance: 502 miles
After enjoying a free continental breakfast (the first of many), Shawn and I gear up and head out. It’s already warm, and it’s going to get warmer, so I start off in my Phoenix jacket; it’s a tad chilly once we hit the interstate, but I tough it out, and within twenty minutes I’m fine. Shawn is taking the opposite approach: he’s perfectly comfortable right now in his Roadcrafter, but I know that by lunchtime he’s going to be smoldering hot.
The first hour of riding is liquid-flat and laser-straight, passing by endless fields of fertile soil that stretch left and right to the horizon. As we cruise by, a funny thought occurs to me:
this is where we grow bread and corn syrup. 
The interstate drones on until we come to the Platte River, and then meanders along the shallow river valley, occasionally crossing a tributary, or wandering back across the Platte River itself. The terrain is so smooth that the only way to tell where the river is is to look for the trees: there’s not enough rain to support a real forest out on the prairie, but the waterlogged earth within 40 yards of the river is crowded with trees.
After 48 miles of this, we exit at Kearney. During a phone conversation the previous evening, my dad had recommended we stop by the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument:
The
Wikipedia article about the Archway Monument describes it as “a museum of and monument to Nebraska's and the Platte River valley's role in westward expansion.” The
article at Roadside America has a slightly more sarcastic take on things, making repeated reference to the history of people traveling
through Nebraska, rather than
to it. 
The entire museum is contained in an elevated span over the highway, seen in the above photo. After paying admission, Shawn and I are handed a set of radio headphones; through some miracle of technology, each exhibit beams a new audio program to our headsets, completely squelching the signal from the previous exhibit. The audio programs are mostly narrations from period characters associated with whatever exhibit we’re viewing.
We head up the long escalator to the lower level of the arch and encounter the first diorama, a covered wagon crossing the prairie toward a distant mesa:
Shawn offers words of encouragement to a pioneer woman struggling to keep her covered wagon moving:
The dioramas are so thorough and detailed that they even have cowshit under the wagons:
As much as we claim to tolerate hot, uncomfortable, or risky conditions on our motorcycle trips, we can’t hold a candle to the people featured in the first exhibits. These are stories of real endurance, terrible hardship, outrageous success, utter failure. Families desperate for a better life take Horace Greeley’s advice to heart and go west, choosing their route and preparations based on little more than apocryphal reports from those who have gone before them. Although many make it, a staggering number are felled by an awful array of calamity: disease, starvation, winter, hostile natives, accident
(“my daughter was walking beside the wagon when her dress became caught under the wheel; before I could halt the contraption, her leg was run over and shattered to pieces…”). Having no means to preserve the dead, standard practice was to bury departed loved ones on the spot and continue the voyage west,
never to visit the gravesite again. Think about that for a moment.
The dioramas, artifacts and audio feed tell a compelling tale, but to me the photographs are even more moving. Unlike the dioramas and voice actors, these are photographs of
real people who lived as much as 140 years ago, each with a real, years-long life story to tell. One photo is a close-in portrait of a girl, maybe 11 years old, with a faint smile. That smile seems to be a rare thing in photos from so long ago, and it catches my eye. She couldn’t have known that over a century later, she would be called upon to help tell the story of this place. I later regret not having taken a picture of her portrait.
Continuing through the archway, the dioramas and exhibits progress through time, showing the establishment of small communities, trading posts, and towns along the main route. Various groups of travelers find their own motives for heading west: some are attracted by gold rushes, some flee religious persecution, and some folks are just looking for better farmland. At the south end of the arch, we climb up a set of stairs and begin traversing the upper level back to the north side. The exhibits describe the completion of the transcontinental railroad that now roughly parallels the interstate, and some decades later, the completion of the
Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast road. Soon after that, the culture of personal travel that arose with the advent of the automobile is chronicled. I’m struck by a philosophical observation from that time, and it seems to capture the mood on the road even today:
The museum continues with an account of the development of the Eisenhower Interstate System in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. All of the culture and business that develops to support and service travelers is featured in some detail, including the classic roadside diner:
Shawn’s picture is timed perfectly, showing my reflection in the polished panel of the cash register.
Inside the diner exhibit, a couple of windows finally give us a glimpse of I-80 below. Two radar guns target eastbound and westbound traffic. Quoting
www.roadsideamerica.com: “We clock a procession of trucks, SUVs and cars and can see that thanks to the interstate, folks are traversing Nebraska faster than ever -- at 79, 78, 74, 82 mph.”
After leaving the museum, we follow the precedent set by the people featured in those exhibits, continuing our westward progress at a rapid pace. The road seems flat and level, but ever since Lincoln, every few seconds, the GPS ticks off another foot of elevation gain; by the time we stop in Ogallala for lunch, we’ve climbed some 2000 feet. The climate and landscape has been changing too: it's hotter and drier, and crop fields have gradually been replaced by grazing lands, heavily irrigated hayfields, and cattle stations.
After lunch, a massive storm cell looms directly west of us. We are saved from a certain soaking when we exit onto I-76 and begin traveling southwest toward Denver. We climb out of the Platte river valley and cross into Colorado, and the terrain changes yet again. So does the speed limit: now we’re cruising at 80+ MPH through a slow-motion rollercoaster of miles-long undulating hills covered with low sage and scrub. The slow climb continues; it’s harder to detect now that the terrain isn’t dead flat, but each hill brings us a little more up and a little less down. In 200 miles, we’ll have gained another 2000 feet of elevation.
We stop at Brush for gas. The highway sign indicates fuel is available, but in a dirty trick of commerce, the first available station appears only after puttering for three hot, increasingly pissed-off miles on a business route that parallels the interstate. It’s late in the day, we’re hot and tired, and we’re anxious to be done; a 25-minute fuel stop isn’t what we had in mind. Worse yet, the station is in a grocery store parking lot, and the bathroom is 50 yards away, hidden somewhere inside that massive supermarket. I’ve gotta pee, but this town has gotten on my nerves, and we’ve already burned enough time. After we agree to saddle up and knock out the remaining miles, Shawn and I thread our way back up to the interstate.
Around milepost 68, my mood brightens considerably; we are treated to the first glimpse of what we came for as we crest a hill and the vast
Front Range of the Rocky Mountains comes into view. Still 70 miles away, the peaks tower above the plains. The distance renders them hazy, but their dark base and sharp snow crest are unmistakable.
The next half-hour rolls off with a much better feeling, and after about 40 miles we hit a turning point. Instead of going all the way to Denver and then north to my sister’s house in Louisville (just south of Boulder), we get off the interstate at exit 25 and head west on SR7. It’s a shorter distance this way, but with slower speeds. The time ends up being the same as via Denver, but the regular traffic lights occasionally allow us to briefly unload our saddles and stretch our legs. We’re still 30 miles west of the mountains, but already we’re surrounded by dense suburban development, housing subdivisions, strip malls and traffic, the edge of the Denver sprawl.
After slogging our way through the remaining 25 miles, we arrive at my sister’s house in Louisville, where we’re promptly recruited to help assemble and position a brand new kitchen table, described in the shipping paperwork as “less than 200 kilograms.” Judging by the way the store’s two delivery guys are grunting and straining as they bring the box into the house, it’s not much less than that. But with four adults (me, Shawn, my sister and her husband) instead of two, it’s a piece of cake. After a half-hour’s work, it’s over – a small price to pay for free lodging and time spent with my sister and her family.
Writing is hard work; I have no visions of myself as a writer or photographer, but I write because I want to. Write lots or write little, but do it for yourself, and if others like it, great... 
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