Day 6 of our Midwest/Great Plains trip started out redriving many of the Omaha area freeways, dodging thunderstorms southward to Kansas City, and figuring out how far south to travel in Kansas. This post focuses on our morning drive around Omaha and the first AARoads visit to St. Joseph since Justin took photos here in 2003. More button copy remains in service along Interstate 680 around the city [...]
Day five of our Midwest/Great Plains trip took us from a start in West Fargo southward along the I-29 corridor to the Council Bluffs, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska area. A cloudy and drizzly morning appeared to be setting the stage for another murky day, but as it progressed, the clouds finally lifted resulting in a great day to explore some roads. Construction is underway along Business Loop I-94 & U.S. [...]
We pick up in Iowa, where we decide to stop heading east in order to get to New Mexico. We see flooding along the Missouri River, and catch a thunderstorm in Kansas. Minimum maintenance road. Flooding causes standing water. Standing water causes mosquitoes and other insects. A fresh source of food means the dragonflies grow fat and happy. This one was about three inches long, with a five inch wingspan. [...]
The longest swath of the Fourth of July trip that we’ll feature in one set of photos: about 800 miles covered in this burst. Continuing on US-212 across eastern Montana, to get to South Dakota, and then driving through the Black Hills at the time of day when they are the blackest. We then continue into Nebraska, and drive US-20 east all the way to Iowa. Endless fields of yellow [...]
East along I-80 in Nebraska, then north along I-29 into South Dakota, then westbound on I-90 – all the while looking for old signs. First thing in the morning. US highway 30 eastbound in western Nebraska. We follow 30 for a while because it’s a mile or two away from I-80 and more likely to have old signs. It may or may not be rather cold. Catch of the day! [...]
Here are photos from Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. I woke up in Wyoming after being awake for 80+ hours, experiencing near-total biological failure and thus getting a lease on a $26 motel room and my continued sanity. I headed south to visit my friend Brian, then was about to turn back west to take photos of the Rockies… before noting that a Snowstorm of Usual Occurrence was blowing through [...]
Spent the final day, or what I thought was to be the final day, mainly around the Elkhorn vicinity of west Omaha. We also took a short drive northwest to Fremont to document the freewayization of U.S. 275 to U.S. 30. As I wrote about in a previous post, NDOR (Nebraska Department of Roads) is indeed upgrading all of U.S. 275 into a freeway from Fremont southeast to West Dodge [...]
Started the day in west Omaha on U.S. 275 and U.S. 6 (West Dodge Road) and quickly departed for Minneapolis by way of Sioux City, Sioux Falls, Worthington, Albert Lea, and Faribault to the Twin Cities. As written about in a previous post, the West Dodge Road freeway is now wholly complete between U.S. 275 and Interstate 680. The final portion of this project are the twin viaducts carrying U.S. [...]
Work involving the West Dodge Road project in Omaha enters the final stages... At stake is the upgrading of U.S. 6 (West Dodge Road) to a full freeway from Interstate 680 west to 132nd Street in west Omaha by replacing the surface expressway alignment with a pair of three-lane viaducts above and parallel to the original roadway. Before construction, West Dodge Road existed as a six-lane expressway complete with east [...]
