June 1st - Omaha, Nebraska

We had planned this day to be a low-stress day as we would be driving at least 300 miles into South Dakota on the morrow. So we drove just over the Missouri River into Omaha to walk the Lewis and Clark Volksmarch there, but otherwise rested in camp. The drive into Omaha was a very short stretch of Interstate 80 and, given light Sunday morning traffic, also very quick.

The starting point for the Omaha YRE was the Visitors Center across from the Omaha Zoo and near the Omaha stadium. The walk route consists of a straight stretch into the downtown district, followed by a big loop around downtown and the Missouri waterfront area, and ending with a straight stretch back out to the Visitors Center. The leg into town passed thru an old neighborhood that did, however, have one famous house: the early home of Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire was a long, skinny guy who could waltz with a hat rack and make it look graceful—with human partners he did even better. To celebrate that landmark we waltzed a few steps as we passed it—fortunately nobody was there to watch us dancing in the street—and continued over the bridge to the downtown area.

Downtown we circled thru the ConAgra corporate headquarters and were really favorably impressed. The company has a nicely landscaped campus there with at least 5 buildings, but all of these buildings were designed in the same basic redbrick, low-rise fashion that gives them a harmony like the nicer college campuses. The landscaping included extensive flowerbeds, fountains, and even a carillon that chimed out 11 o’clock while we were passing by.

After the Conagra campus we curled back thru the adjacent small park to an overlook on the Missouri River. The park included a tiny lake complete with a Venetian gondola as its centerpiece. It was quite pretty, but we were both bothered by the continual smell of urine around the lake. I couldn’t see any reason for it and for a while thought I was having an olfactory hallucination or mistaking some kind of related odor. But we later saw that the park is a congregating point for all the homeless folks in the area and that certainly explains the open bathroom smell.

We continued on a nice river walk into the heart of downtown. It was very nicely laid out as a streamside park but with none of the commercial development that we saw on San Antonio’s much longer and larger river walk. We passed by some really super stainless steel slides set in concrete. Apparently the trick with these slides was to use wax paper as a seat so you can slide faster—the kids were having a ball on them. On our way out of the park we were panhandled for money and saw many adult males lying about with their bundles of clothing and possessions, but no one gave us any real difficulty.

The checkpoint for this walk is closed on Sundays, so we put in the alternate information of the number of the building and started to close the downtown loop and start back. The last part of the downtown loop has an old market area with several restaurants and, indeed, a farmer’s market each Saturday morning. This was a nice area to stop and have lunch, which we did, and then continued back out to the Visitors Center. All in all, we felt the Omaha walk was OK but not that special—I think the homeless population decreased our enjoyment of the downtown park area in the same way it did in the Atlanta, Georgia, YRE we walked a couple years ago.

Reclaiming our truck we drove back across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, but turned off immediately to visit the National Park Services Western Trails Center. This center has one large room with exhibits on the Lewis and Clark expedition’s trail, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Mormon Trail. The travails of these travelers were contrasted with driving across the country today both in the exhibit area and in a short movie in the attached auditorium. The movie was a pastiche of short takes that shifted continually from the experiences of the early travelers, which I found interesting, to the experience of a modern family traveling in a minivan and staying in hotels, which I did not. The continual shift in topic and viewpoint was slightly disturbing—I would have preferred a section focused on early travelers followed by a section focusing on today’s travelers, or something more coherent like that.

The exhibits had pictures or paintings and silhouetted groups for each of the trails as well as other critical points like crossing rivers, winter camps, and so forth. We both spent at least an hour reading all of these and enjoyed them very much. One inaccuracy I found for the Lewis and Clark part was the claim that York, Clark’s black slave, was released right after the expedition. In fact, York had to wait at least 4 or 5 years more before Clark deigned to give him his freedom. But I was impressed by the Mormons pushing their hand carts over a thousand miles from Iowa to Salt Lake City—what a trek, and under what harsh and primitive conditions! Can you imagine how hard it would be for the European converts making that trek when they didn’t even speak English? You have to be a real believer to do something like that, I would think.

From the museum displays I also finally found out what I am, or more accurately, what the Politically Correct designation for someone like me is: Euro-American. After all these years of believing in the Melting Pot and just thinking about myself as American, I have at last discovered my correct hyphenated ethic heritage. Since my mother was legally a Canadian when I was born, I’ve been worried since this hyphenation thing started that I should really call myself a Canuck-American. Of course, if we dig deeper in my mongrel past I had a great grandmother who was French, so I thought that maybe I should call myself a Canuck-Frog-American, I wasn’t sure. But pity my children, who, since I married a German, would then have to be called Canuck-Frog-Kraut-Americans. You can see why I was so grateful to discover the proper hyphenation for my kids and me. I’m sure we can all sleep easier at night knowing our correct hyphenations! But somehow I don’t think the frontier settlers from overseas in the 1800s worried about their correct hyphenations—they were simply intent on becoming Americans and had much more serious things to worry about on the trek west.

The Oregon and California trails were terribly harsh—the descriptions of the trailside littered with the bones of draft animals and discarded goods were quite vivid. Conversely, the hope of a better life and for European settlers the promise of owning their own land must have been very inspiring. It was a case of tremendous motivation overcoming tremendous adversity, in my opinion. But thank goodness it’s so much easier these days for those of us retracing these routes. This time we’re doing Lewis and Clark, but it would probably be fun to retrace the Oregon and California trails some day too.

After a quick stop at Wal-Mart for groceries, we went back to camp for a “make and mend” day as the old sailors would have put it. Monika washed the truck, cleaned camp, and selected pictures for the journal. I did some journal writing, painted color codes on the rods for the screen house, and got in Monika’s way. So we each did our thing that evening in preparation for the big shift westward the next day. One thing we did not do was take a shower, but that was because the bathrooms were just so ill-maintained in this park. We had seen neither hide nor hair of the campground host, nor any evidence that he was cleaning the facilities, and so we used them as infrequently as possible.

Consider what happens when you run out of toilet paper. Toilet paper is one of those mundane necessities of life that you never really think about until you need and don’t have it, but then you really think about it! The men’s room in this park didn’t have any TP for several days. The first time took me by surprise because all the parks we had stayed at until this one always were well stocked with TP. In desperation I rummaged around in my pants pockets until I found some spare Kleenexes and napkins that I could use in a pinch, which this definitely was. After that I made sure to take extra paper along with me just in case—sometimes other campers would donate their spare rolls of TP—but the uncertainty was disconcerting and something you just don’t want to cope with when you’re half asleep. I don’t know if this lack of maintenance is typical of all Iowa state parks or just happened at Lake Manawa State Park, but I surely would recommend that people doing the walks in this area consider camping in some other park. Altho we put off taking a shower, we decided to compensate by staying at a hotel on our drive to Pierre, South Dakota and taking multiple showers or baths there.