The Travels of Eric and Lorna

For a short weekend trip in celebration of our 15 th wedding anniversary, L and I decided to make a short weekend trip to Lincoln . Yes, Nebraska . We both too Friday off, and headed out that morning, taking our time, since it is only a little over three hours away by car. We arrived around lunchtime, and dined at a place called Buzzard Billy's , a Cajun place. My shrimp po -boy was very good, as was the locally brewed brown ale. We drove up early so we could go to the National Museum of Roller Skating , which is not open on the weekends. This museum was pretty small, and was kind of funny. There was some interesting stuff there, but I don't think I could recommend going to Lincoln just to see it. Some of the really old skates were fun to see, and some of the costumes from the 70s were a riot. The funniest thing was that the building had a bunch of people working in cubicles for the National Roller Skating Association. I saw at least 12 people working there. Is this o...

Today, after braving the annoying crowd at the free breakfast, we headed out. There was a little league baseball tournament in town, and our hotel was full of young (junior high age) baseball players and their families. The kids were, on the whole, well-behaved; it was the parents who were the annoying ones, really. Our destination was the farmer's market held in the Haymarket District just south of the University of Nebraska's main campus. The market was crowded and pretty cool. It was more like a craft market than a farmer's market, really, but I bet this changes as it gets later in the year. The guy at Bad Robot (great store, check it out) said that the market would expand onto another street the next weekend. The booths here were the usual kind of thing, with a couple of exceptions. First, the longest line I saw there was for a woman selling egg rolls. The line was long enough when we first got there that we didn't want to stand in it. I did later when ...

After sleeping in, we packed to leave for home. On the way out of town we stopped at the promising-looking Hi-Way Diner , which we had seen before. After some slow service we got our food, which was good. We had decided to take the scenic route home, and headed south to Beatrice, NE (stress the second syllable to see Homestead National Monument . We weren't really sure what to expect here, but it is very nice. One of the buildings is new and very cool. The displays in this building, as well as the short documentary film they show, were very well done. L took the car from this building to the other, and I walked the short (.4 mile) trail to the other building. The tall grass prairie. A panorama of the homestead. A little log cabin that had been moved from another location in the same county. Here's a detail of the end cuts used, as this can be regionally diagnostic. Homestead is an excellent monument, and you can get a good overview and history of the entire homesteading ...