What a great riding day! Gorgeous sun, relatively flat terrain, a tailwind ... beautiful! I rode 50 miles on Friday, and they were 50 really great miles.
One of the great things about this ride is that even driving the route is gorgeous, so doing my share of driving the sag wagon is OK.
I was driving the last leg of the route, into Missouri Valley, Iowa, where we were planning to camp in the municipal park. Until we saw that the camping area was under an underpass, next to the local swimming pool, and surrounded by jungle gyms and the local fairgrounds ... luckily, the Days Inn a mile away had room for us.
We cleaned up and headed south to Council Bluffs to see the Lewis & Clark monument there; Council Bluffs was a major location in their journey because it was the location of a meeting with the leaders of several local tribes. President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark out with one of their missions being to engage the Indian tribes in friendly commercial relations, and this meeting was to be an important part of advancing those relationships. Thus the name of Council Bluffs, and the memorial there, commemorate the importance of this mission.
Council Bluffs is across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, and I had found us a local micro-brewpub for dinner and good beer. So we headed out, in advance of an extremely threatening-looking sky. As we walked into the L&C memorial in Council Bluffs, we heard the severe storm warning siren from Omaha. So we got to watch this extremely serious storm roll in:
It was just stunning to watch the wall cloud move through at 50+ miles/hour, which we did until the wind and rain reached us on the other side of the river. We watched the wind through Omaha knock trees down into transformers, and we could see the shocks and sparks from all the way across the river as the transformers blew. The wind also kicked up serious dust, and as we watched, the dust cloud blocked our view of Omaha -- totally obliterated it.
The storm passed very quickly, and when we got to Omaha the summer arts festival had its vendor tents blown down. Luckily for us, the historic area near the river still had power, and we really enjoyed our dinner at Upstream Brewing. I really liked our Omaha visit:
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