DAY 4: Rapid City SD to Omaha NE - giving us 2 more states, Iowa[38] and Nebraska[39]

9/03

A long day of travelling and we chose the road less traveled. It brought us to Badlands National Park. The Big wall consist of petrified white mud/clay like earth a couple of hundred feet high. The erosion is spectacular leaving deep canyons and gulleys. Dongas and gulches surrounded by white flats that create a moonscape second to none.

From there east on the Interstate for a hundred miles before we turned off again to pursue the smaller roads. We roughly followed the Missouri River. Sometimes we were close, then again we were far and oblivious that it was there. Sometimes on high ground looking down on it and sometimes low on a causeway with water all round.

 Initially the road was quiet but gradually more fellow road users appeared, sometimes other travelers with out-of-state plates and sometimes tractors or other farming equipment crawling along the road and forcing us to drop to 10 miles an hour.

Once we crossed the State line into Nebraska the towns, though small were close together and we rarely traveled more than 15 miles before some small establishment appeared. The population of these places were mostly  a couple of hundred but sometimes it was less than 100 and sometimes more than 1000.

Then we found it. Monowi, NE has a population of 1[ONE]! I kid you not!

Eventually we crossed the river into Iowa and followed the Interstate to Omaha for a very good steak dinner.

That’s it for today