Saturday, June 8, 1996
Day 28
Niobrara, Nebraska
Today's Miles: 0
Cumulative Miles for the Tour: 1779
Degree of Difficulty: Rest Day
Terrain: Campground
Find of the Day: Niobrara, Nebraska and the Missouri River
Rest days are getting more essential as we get farther into the trip. The body can only take so much, and then it says, "Nope, we've got to rest, now." This is a beautiful place to set out the tents for a couple of days.
We started off this morning with Dave's favorite, Saturday morning breakfast of french toast and bacon. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything since the raft tour of the Missouri River didn't start until 1:30.The state of Nebraska park systems has set up a nice interpretive program for the Niobrara State Park. This is the central location for a lot of the history of the westward migration of the white settlers as they came through in the 1800's. Our tour guide of the raft trip was a professor of Plains Indian history at one of the local colleges. During the floating trip, he gave us a lot of background history on the skirmishes in the area. He also gave a short talk at dinner tonight, stressing the importance of the Missouri River in the expansion of the United States and the wiping out of the Indian cultures as settlers took over the plains states.Dinner was something you can only get in this area...all you can eat buffalo stew with Indian fry bread. It was some of the best stew I've had in a long time. I think I ended up eating four bowls. (If a lot of this journal sounds like it centers around food, you're right. It's hard to get enough food to supply over 4000 calories a day.)We're all looking forward to heading into Iowa next week. We're looking for long, straight, FLAT roads before we head into the mountain ranges of the east. It's hard to believe we're over halfway to the east coast. Sometimes it feels interminable when pedaling 85 miles a day, but as we talk about it around the camp each night, it's a shock how fast the time has gone by...only three weeks to go before we get to DC.
Bike America Tours
dblair@wtp.net
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