Indiana or Bust: Day 3

I drove about 550 miles today, across Nebraska on a sunny clear day that was so unseasonably warm I took my jacket off once when I was outside. I trekked into Lincoln and Omaha before I decided to solve yesterday's lingering question of whether I should head to Iowa or head towards St. Louis with the obvious answer:

So that means tonight, I get to tick off Iowa on my visited states list (bringing my new total to 29) and tomorrow I'll set off for St. Louis, hoping to spend the afternoon checking it out before finally heading to the end of my journey, in Indiana.

While today remained clear, it was hella windy. I had 40mph winds during most of the entire trip, and it finally got really cold when I got to Iowa where it's a balmy 16ºF/-9ºC outside. Surprisingly, there weren't many (any?) windmills in Nebraska to take advantage of all this free wind energy, but Iowa sure seemed to have plenty. Does Nebraska prefer burning coal to capturing free winds for energy?

Some photos

Everyone should know The Pony Express was a flash-in-pan startup that quickly failed, replaced by a superior technology

Driving across the country on this trip, I followed a lot of the Oregon trail and the Pony Express trail, and there were dozens of signs, monuments, statues, plaques, and sites where you could stand on the trails, and see where they started and where they ended.

I've heard about the Pony Express all my life in US History classes growing up and it comes up often as an example of American ingenuity. We were told that taking a letter across the US by stagecoach took many weeks to several months, as stagecoaches generally only covered 25 miles a day. The Pony Express offered a cross country trip for a letter or package in only 10 days, which was impressive, and yeah, sure that's way faster (ignoring all the fighting with natives on their land that the Pony Express rode horses through).

BUT IT ONLY EXISTED FOR 18 MONTHS BEFORE THEY FOLDED!

I just learned that last fact maybe a month ago, reading Wikipedia, and I previously had no idea. It's such a central story of the West that is taught to all American kids in school, and it comes up constantly in our culture, but I didn't know until recently that it started in 1860, then shuttered before the end of 1861 because a cross-country telegraph was faster, cheaper, and less dangerous.

All those kids history books mentioning the Pony Express and all the monuments set aside to highlight it and then you realize how short its own existence was. Heck, you can say other ground-breaking startup ideas like Kozmo, WebVan, and Pets.com lasted much longer than the Pony Express ever did.

Where is the statue of a Kozmo delivery person astride their mighty orange Vespa bringing me a copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater for the Playstation and a carton of Theraflu on the rare sick days I took in San Francisco in 2000?

It's important to remind drivers that Jesus died at least once every 50 miles

I never took any photos of this, but sheesh, there are tons of billboards and handmade signs on farmers' lands telling you about Jesus and his death and your influence on that via all the sinning you are doing. It started in Oregon, and went through every other state but boy did it pick up in Nebraska. I need to remember to commit some more sins on this trip, I don't want to let the big guy down since he did me such a solid.

Nebraska summed up in one image

I didn't take a lot of photos while driving hundreds of miles across the featureless landscape of Nebraska but I did remember it with one shot:

No wait, that's a Mark Rothko. But you get the idea. Pale, blue skies with leafless trees, on a barren, brown landscape, uninterrupted for 300 miles. That's what Nebraska looks like.

For six hours straight.

Nebraska has its strengths though: Runza!

I take everything bad I said about Nebraska back, because eventually I got to Lincoln and Omaha and they were both fun cities with classical architecture and then I learned they had Runza. What's Runza you ask?

I had no idea what one was until earlier today but when I asked a friend and former Cornhusker what regional cuisine I should try and he mentioned Runza and boy howdy was this worth it, even from a fast food chain that specializes in it.

It's basically a meat pie, or a hand pie, with ground beef and cabbage inside a nice soft, light bread roll. I dipped mine in some yellow mustard between bites and loved every second of it (also the Runza chain does crinkly fries which is also the best choice in fries).

So yeah, it's basically a slightly elevated version of a Hot Pocket, but with good ingredients and cooked perfectly instead of the way a Hot Pocket usually is.

Runza reminds me that as I've traveled the world, I've come up with a few foods we don't have much of in America but really should. They are:

Meat pies and hand pies. You can get these all over Australia, New Zealand, and much of Western Europe. They're delicious and easy to eat on the go. Somehow they're always light and flaky on the outside, but sturdy enough to be eaten one-handed, leaving your other to hold a bottle of water or a can of coke. They're cheap and plentiful and the insides are sort of like a chicken pot pie in America, but thicker, and usually beef-based. I have no idea why meat pies aren't a huge thing available everywhere because they really should be in the USA.

Arancini. I'd never had Arancini until I went to Italy and then I wanted one every day after. It's pretty simple: you grab a handful of yesterday's leftover risotto your restaurant didn't sell, put a chunk of mozzarella in the middle, then deep fry the whole thing and serve it as today's appetizer with a side of marinara sauce. It's the same kind of ingenuity that makes yesterday's unsold tortillas become today's fresh tortilla chips at your table served with salsa. Anyway, they're starting to show up on more Italian restaurant menus in the US, but I'm still surprised Burger King doesn't sell you a small bucket of them for $5 but alas, we don't have quite the risotto waste stream that Italy does.

Honorable mentions: Tim-Tams and Squash. When I first went to Australia, I fell in love with Tim Tams, the delightful chocolatey "cookie" that's more like candy than a dessert. They finally have them in some Target stores here now, but eating them in Australia or New Zealand they're perfectly light and flaky and filled with chocolate and we should have copied them decades ago. Same goes for Squash, a generic term for lemon-lime soda mostly kids drank when I was in Australia. It's like Sprite, but actually yellow and something like 10-20% of the juice inside is actual juice from real fruits and not just chemicals. They're still loaded with sugar, but something about actual fruit juice in soda makes them feel better for you. Anyway, that's also something we should copy here.

So, back to Runza. They're a great, fast, easy way to eat lunch and they taste good and man I wish this Nebraska German immigrant delicacy expanded with a nationwide chain.

Maverik is the goddamned best

Now that I'm out of the western states, I no longer see Maverik stations everywhere and it's a bummer. I know Buc-ees and WaWa are the great gas stations in this country but we never had anything like those in the West until recently. Maverik is like the In 'N Out Burger of gas stations. It's clean, reliable, has decent hot and cold food inside, and any beverage you can imagine. The pumps always work, they take Apple Pay in an instant, and the gas prices are usually pretty low. The restrooms are ample and clean as a whistle.

Listen, I know cars are bad for the environment but we have this big dumb country that requires a car to get to almost any of it and gas stations are generally the pits, so it's nice to see a company just try to make the lousiest part of driving a car quite a bit better. I always gravitate towards that familiar red logo any time I see it glowing on the horizon and I'm bummed they dried up after Wyoming.

Tomorrow, I finish!

I'm planning to get up early, head to St. Louis, gaze at an arch and maybe check out the City Museum, then I'm off to Indiana where I'll ultimately drop the car off and end my journey. It's been fun and a real blast to see the country. I've always thought about doing cross-country drives from when I was a very little kid, and while this is my first, I am certain it won't be my last.

I really need to drive all the way to the Atlantic Ocean someday for the completist in me.

Next stop: The Day 4 finale.