My Vacation -- Part 1 -- the 'Rents
Aug. 22nd, 2007 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
Right, so I've been on vacation all last week (plus some). Let's recap the salient points:
The first part of the trip was a flight back home to Nebraska to see the folks. The flight was entirely uneventful although when I got to Omaha and went to get my car, they didn't have any full-sized cars, so the bumped me up to an SUV. I got a red Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. Let me tell you -- that thing was a complete beast. Driving around in it was rather nerve-wracking. It got surprisingly good mileage though.
For the most part, the trip home was pretty uneventful. We mostly hung out around the house and chit chatted, we took drives around to see some stuff that's changed. Kearney, Nebraska has just mushroomed in size lately and although I didn't really want to know, the amount of house you can buy out there for cheap will make you cry.
Mostly, I go home so that my mom can do the adventurous things that Dad won't normally do with her. Usually this means exotic food or a trip somewhere and in this case it was a bit of both. Apparently, there are a number of wineries in Nebraska and there's one just outside my hometown (a small hamlet of 1200 people in the middle of nowhere). So Mom and I went out to try a few wine samples. Honestly? They has some really good stuff. I wasn't keen on their dry wines (and aren't big on them in general), but their sweet wines were very good. They had this blackberry sangria that was amazing. They also had (from a winery in Chadron NE) mead. Real, honest-to-goodness, made-from-honey-and-nothing-but mead. And it was really pretty good. Maybe not the best mead I've ever had, but it was still a very, very good mead. I was pleasantly surprised and if I'd had any way to get it back in my luggage, I would've picked up some bottles.
The adventure was supplied by the canoe trip. My mom wanted to go canoeing on the Niobrara river along the Nebraska/South Dakota border. So, one 3 hour drive later, we're in Valentine, Nebraska where we briefly drive to the S. Dakota border to see the windmill-powered casino, go back and spend the night and the next morning we go for our 3-hour canoe trip.
My mom has never been canoing before, but luckily the river isn't all that deep and there really aren't any rapids to speak of. So it's not that difficult...except that it's over 100-degrees. The river cuts through a small canyon but once the sun clears the ridge, there's no escape from the sun and it's pretty brutal. Also, the river is shallow and there are a couple of parts where we're literally scraping the canoe along. It's a very, very hot trip, and I definitely had some very light heatstroke symptoms when we finished up, but it wasn't anything a bottle of Gatorade couldn't fix. Overall we both had fun and my dad was happy to just wander Valentine and hang out at the river-end waiting for us to float by.
We drove back through the Sandhills and passed quite a few wind turbines. I suspect the Great Plains is going to continue to see a strong growth in wind-power since it's probably even more reliable than solar power and you can still graze cattle on a wind farm.
That was pretty much the big excitement for my trip back home. On Wednesday I drove back to Omaha, got a huge speeding ticket on the way (you get double points for work zone stops) and flew on to GenCon. Since I've got some photos and stuff, I'll put that stuff up in my next post.
later
Tom
Right, so I've been on vacation all last week (plus some). Let's recap the salient points:
The first part of the trip was a flight back home to Nebraska to see the folks. The flight was entirely uneventful although when I got to Omaha and went to get my car, they didn't have any full-sized cars, so the bumped me up to an SUV. I got a red Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. Let me tell you -- that thing was a complete beast. Driving around in it was rather nerve-wracking. It got surprisingly good mileage though.
For the most part, the trip home was pretty uneventful. We mostly hung out around the house and chit chatted, we took drives around to see some stuff that's changed. Kearney, Nebraska has just mushroomed in size lately and although I didn't really want to know, the amount of house you can buy out there for cheap will make you cry.
Mostly, I go home so that my mom can do the adventurous things that Dad won't normally do with her. Usually this means exotic food or a trip somewhere and in this case it was a bit of both. Apparently, there are a number of wineries in Nebraska and there's one just outside my hometown (a small hamlet of 1200 people in the middle of nowhere). So Mom and I went out to try a few wine samples. Honestly? They has some really good stuff. I wasn't keen on their dry wines (and aren't big on them in general), but their sweet wines were very good. They had this blackberry sangria that was amazing. They also had (from a winery in Chadron NE) mead. Real, honest-to-goodness, made-from-honey-and-nothing-but mead. And it was really pretty good. Maybe not the best mead I've ever had, but it was still a very, very good mead. I was pleasantly surprised and if I'd had any way to get it back in my luggage, I would've picked up some bottles.
The adventure was supplied by the canoe trip. My mom wanted to go canoeing on the Niobrara river along the Nebraska/South Dakota border. So, one 3 hour drive later, we're in Valentine, Nebraska where we briefly drive to the S. Dakota border to see the windmill-powered casino, go back and spend the night and the next morning we go for our 3-hour canoe trip.
My mom has never been canoing before, but luckily the river isn't all that deep and there really aren't any rapids to speak of. So it's not that difficult...except that it's over 100-degrees. The river cuts through a small canyon but once the sun clears the ridge, there's no escape from the sun and it's pretty brutal. Also, the river is shallow and there are a couple of parts where we're literally scraping the canoe along. It's a very, very hot trip, and I definitely had some very light heatstroke symptoms when we finished up, but it wasn't anything a bottle of Gatorade couldn't fix. Overall we both had fun and my dad was happy to just wander Valentine and hang out at the river-end waiting for us to float by.
We drove back through the Sandhills and passed quite a few wind turbines. I suspect the Great Plains is going to continue to see a strong growth in wind-power since it's probably even more reliable than solar power and you can still graze cattle on a wind farm.
That was pretty much the big excitement for my trip back home. On Wednesday I drove back to Omaha, got a huge speeding ticket on the way (you get double points for work zone stops) and flew on to GenCon. Since I've got some photos and stuff, I'll put that stuff up in my next post.
later
Tom
