Cross Country Vacation - Part One

Part one of our cross country vacation was our adventures driving across this beautiful land.   Our first rest stop was in Maryland, where we had a beautiful view of our rolling valleys in the eastern United States.

Skip looks pretty cool in his sunglasses!

Our first night we spent in Columbus, Ohio.   After finding a hotel, we found a Chinese take out place open, and while waiting for our food "enjoyed" the thrift store decor and a coconut water.

 One of our other stops was Omaha, Nebraska.   We wanted to see the church site there known as Winter Quarters.   It's the area where the pioneers stopped and settled for the winter after leaving Nauvoo and trekking across Iowa for several months.   I knew there was a cemetery and a temple there, but didn't know they had such a nice museum/visitor's center.   It was definitely worth a stop.   They were about to close, but one of the senior missionaries gave us a quick tour of the museum and let us use the facilitates.   We had to find our hotel on the other side of town, but we promised to come back in the morning, which we did, and took some time to watch a movie, see some more of the exhibits, and enjoy the peace of the cemetery.

Our last stop before arriving in Idaho was Cheyenne, Wyoming.   Our method of finding hotels was to go to online sites, find something reasonable, and book it if the reviews weren't too bad.   The Hitching Post Inn sounded reasonable, but after booking it, I think Skip looked it up online to find out it had been burned down!   We thought we'd been scammed, but after further investigation found that a major part of it had burned down and they had reopened some of the buildings, with a couple of rooms serving as the office.  After driving past a few other seedy looking hotels,  we found our hotel with a neon OPEN sign, and the makeshift LOBBY banner.

It turned out to be a very large, comfortable room, with the bed at least 15 feet from the window, which was good, because there was a raging thunderstorm throughout much of the night that flooded the room near the window!