Observations from our trip

1. Crossing Nebraska always takes longer than you expect it to. (Well most things do with a child, to be honest, including any "quick" bathroom stops...but especially NE.)
2. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" is still just as funny no matter how many times you listen to it, while "The Motorcycle (Significance of the Pickle) Song" was very funny at first years ago but now is only relatively funny when it's been a long time between listens.*
3. Every state except Indiana seems to have a surplus of orange barrels and must believe that September is the month to use them for closing one lane of a long stretch of highway without any hint of any work getting done. Of course this meant that when one lane of expressway in Indiana really did require closing for a quarter mile (causing a several mile backup), they had no cones and had to rely on police cruisers with flashing lights.
4. I expected more nostalgia visiting places I haven't been for awhile--instead, despite how much older many kids I'd taught or known had grown and the new buildings all around, more often I was struck that it didn't seem I'd been gone long at all.
5. Winner of the best-named river goes to the Nishnabotna River in western Iowa.
6. It's amazing how quickly a barely-potty-trained child learns he can claim he needs to use the potty just because he's sick of his car seat and wants to get out for a few minutes to play.
7. The woods around Camp Roger remain an incredibly powerful part of something deep in my psyche.
8. Forget Area 51--alien technologies can be seen crossing Illinois on flatbed semi trailers (actually I think they were a pair of blades for a huge windmill, but alien tech sounds cooler**). And other strange things can be seen on the semis of Nebraska.
   
9. The real speed demons seem to be out in force during the day-time--I often had people whipping by me in the mornings, but rarely in the evenings or late at night, though I kept my cruise at the same speed in relation to the speed limit the entire time.
10. For all the coffee I drank in the trip, I rarely liked the coffee--none of it was as good as what I make at home. Hotel coffee was burnt, and I never seemed to get the amount of coffee right when using other people's coffee makers.
    

*We also listened to the 2-disc Precious Friend with him and Pete Seeger, and Arlo has two talking songs there--"Celery Consciousness" which is pretty funny, and "Un-Neutron Bomb" which is very funny despite the fact that it references political situations that took place well before I was old enough to pay attention to them. But I'm not familiar with any of the other Arlo Guthrie albums beside that and "Greatest Hits"--does anyone know anything about his more recent albums?

**Actually, the type of windmills on the wind farms we passed are pretty cool themselves.