Day 1: Leaving Iowa for Lake McConaughy, NE

Day 1: Des Moines, Iowa to Lake McConaughy, Nebraska via North Platte

Saturday, July 27, 2013

We are off! Day 1. When the RV arrived yesterday afternoon, it was clear that no one has really cleaned it in a while… We spent our first few hours with it washing the insides and spraying disinfectant. With boys dragging their blankets around and going barefoot, we wanted them to at least not catch anything. We finished packing the RV last night around 1 am and there was more clean-up and last minute items to organize inside until about 2 am. When Peter was the first one up at 6 am, it made for a short sleep! Luckily, there was not much work to do this morning other than for Ricardo, who still needed to pack; we were able to leave by 9:30 am. We managed to back out of our driveway without scraping anything and we were on our way.

Sunny, clear, breezy and about 80 F, the weather was perfect. We drove on I-80 west in Iowa, passing the windmills, Lake Anita and Council Bluffs.  The boys were kept entertained by the novelty of riding in an RV and by drawing many pictures of RVs. We identified every interesting truck on the road and Alle started to track license plates. We stopped for a corned beef hash style brunch at a Sapp Bros. Café outside of Omaha, NE and visited the largest railroad train “classification and connection” yard in the world in North Platte, NE on our way to Lake McConaughy, Nebraska.

Our only mishap so far is that Peter crashed while running on the concrete near the railway yard on our way back to our camper. We were focused on his knees when I noticed a huge goose-egg bump on his forehead. Ricardo ran off to get ice (which almost required an “incident report” from the gift shop) and I tried to hold frozen pasta from our little freezer on board, to help the swelling bump. Peter is a trooper and after about 30 minutes of icing and some kids’ Tylenol, he announced it didn’t hurt anymore although it is still a very large bruised bump.

Our other surprise came when we arrived at our camping area near the North Lake Lodge after about eight hours of driving. This is our once in a trip opportunity- hopefully - to experience a very crowded area of trailers and campers filled with rowdy families. Our site was filled with the overflow from a large beer drinking family in the three sites next to ours. Hmmm, we are planning to leave early tomorrow for Thermopolis, Wyoming. We are hoping the camping areas get better from here!