The Two and a Half Day Vacation

The two and a half day vacation, while fun, was not nearly as funny as the show of almost the same name. I had last week off from school, so Derek took it off, too. Our grand plans to go to Mexico or Chicago went nowhere, so we decided to see the beauty that is western Nebraska in October. We piled in the Derek's vehicle, the "V", and headed west on I80. Our first stop was The Great Platte River Road Archway, a museum that crosses I80. If you hate crowds of other tourists when you're on vacation, this is the place for you. I've been twice and it's deserted. That's too bad because it is a pretty good museum. After that we headed to Alliance, Nebraska, home of Carhenge. Yep, it's a model of Stonehenge built out of cars. We headed further into western Nebraska, wandered on some pretty deserted dirt roads and finally found a paved road at the South Dakota border. Derek wanted to keep going north, so we turned and went to South Dakota. By that time, we were fairly close to Mt. Rushmore, so we stopped by there before we turned the V and headed home. We never got to a town at a good stopping time and we didn't feel like paying for another hotel, so we (and by that, I mean Derek) kept driving and got back to Lincoln at midnight on the same day as we saw Mt. Rushmore. It was a fast trip, but a good one.