The Prairie States

We began yesterday in Laramie (mile 412). After Cheyenne, we left the monotony of the interstate and followed the Goldwing's GPS route through Wyoming into Nebraska on the backroads. What a beautiful country we have. Everytime I travel across it, I continue to be amazed at how lucky we are to live in it. The cornfields, sugar beet fields, millet and soybean fields, and the rolling grasslands of the prairie, are all just lovely. The picture with the road and bike is what much of our travel looked like yesterday. We stayed over at the Riverside Campground just outside of Valentine, Nebraska (mile 817). The campground was alongside the Niobarra, a slow, lazy sandbar filled river.

Today we traveled across rolling farmlands in Nebraska in the morning and crossed the Missouri River at Ft. Randall into South Dakota. The picture on the left is from a scenic view spot overlooking the Missouri River behind the Ft. Randall Dam. A while later we crossed the James River still showing signs of the floods earlier this year. Many of the fields in the river bottom had been planted in the spring, but flooded, and were never replanted. But they certainly now have some fresh topsoil for next year! We traveled across South Dakota, stopped in Irene, SD for lunch, into Iowa for a while, and finally into Minnesota, getting back onto the interstate for the first time since Cheyenne.

Tonight we checked out the Albert Lea KOA (too close to the interstate) and opted for the hot tub at the Days Inn (mile 1,305). We're just down the street from the Spam Museum in Austin, MN. Tomorrow, we travel on to Door County in Eastern Wisconsin, or somewhere else if the mood takes us!