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Guess What's In Nebraska?
Linda Goin
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I love to travel alone with my daughter. We talk about things that would certainly bore or irritate her buddies and our families. We discuss the relationship between politics and the stock market. We consider which new fad might catch on this fall, and we make up ticker symbols to see if they're on a stock index. We ponder the vast difference of the car's consumption of gas on interstates versus cities. We play "I spy." Cora and I, well, we're just a couple of traveling nerds.
Nerds we were until we crossed Nebraska. No one in Nebraska could be a nerd. There's too much simplicity in this state to expound on anything profound. There's corn, there's trains, there's less than a handful of major interstates, there's the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, and there's Omaha. That's the extant of highlights for travelers through what was known as America's Frontier. As we crossed this vast, green, flat expanse on the way home from our Colorado vacation, we realized we'd go insane if we didn't get off I-80.
We decided to take a left at Grand Island to catch the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway, an idea conceived by a racecar driver in 1913, is the first intercontinental highway ever built in the United States. This is the road that pulled people from behind wagon trains, out of cramped stagecoaches, and away from smoke-spewing coal-burning locomotives. This is the road that set Americans free in their automobiles. There are several good reasons to take this road. Speed isn't one of them, in spite of that racecar driver's dream. Every ten miles, we came across "reduce your speed" signs as we passed through another almost-ghost town that might have thrived before the construction of I-80. We did get cheaper gas (good thing, since inconsistent speed sucked up the fuel). We ate less expensive food, based on very simple recipes like lettuce and cubes of toasted white bread spiced with Ranch dressing. We also found hotel rooms at much lower cost - a savings of almost twenty dollars per night compared to the interstate hotels. They even had HBO in all their rooms.
All these savings might make up for the time we spent on this highway. However, by the time I reached the Iowa state line, I was almost berserk. I've never seen so many grain elevators in my life. Cora tried to help pass the time. She sang off-key to horrible CDs and made faces at truck drivers to amuse everyone concerned. We stopped every hour and bought a newspaper and a bottle of water. She read the papers out loud. The news concentrated on the drought and its affect on the drooping corn. The crop sure looked healthy to us. No brown to break that sea of green. We counted trains, and raced the ones going in our direction. We waved at the engineers, and tried to get them to blow their horns.
Finally, Cora asked me what everyone did in that state. She wanted to know how they made a living. I looked out over the vast fields of waving leaves and the long lines of rail cars and laughed hysterically. "Cora, they grow corn. They harvest corn, they put the corn on the rail cars, and they ship it out of town. Then they eat the leftover corn, and - if they're lucky - they grow up to become engineers and travel by rail to more corn-growing towns. Why do you ask?"
She wanted to know which Fortune 500 Companies were in Nebraska. We used to play around with the Fortune 500 Companies by State at BUYandHOLD. We thought we'd memorized them all, but the ones for Nebraska somehow escaped us. We tried to remember, as we guessed out loud and discounted every one. Maybe there's a huge pharmaceutical firm based in the next town. Perhaps there's an insurance company hidden among the cottonwoods shading the Platte River. No - wait - there's got to be a huge chain of giant superstores somewhere in the state. Nope, nope, and nope. We found none of this in the fields or in the small towns dotting the highway. We gave up the quest until we arrived home. A few days after we unpacked, Cora brought the issue up again. We sat down and surfed to BUYandHOLD to see which Fortune 500 Companies might settle in Nebraska. When we found the links, we looked at each other and rolled on the floor laughing. This was one of those slap-yourself-on-the-forehead moments that you remember the rest of your life. Let's talk agriculture and trains - what else could be in that state?
After Cora and I read about the companies, we read the local papers snagged in towns along the Lincoln Highway. We wanted to know more about the trains and the corn, the weather and the cost of transportation. Taking the long route home brought more benefits than I first realized. We experienced quite a bit of history by taking that road less traveled (we dare you not to think of Robert Frost), and we learned about some new industries. I also realized we probably absorbed more by slowing down rather than speeding through the state like 90% of the interstate traffic did that day.
One thing for certain, we'll never forget what's in Nebraska.
Until Next Week,
Linda Goin
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