{"id":8647,"date":"2017-05-02T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=8647"},"modified":"2017-04-30T00:49:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-30T05:49:40","slug":"great-plains-trip-day-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2017\/05\/great-plains-trip-day-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Plains Trip Day 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"August 7, 2016:<\/strong> This photo encompasses a significant portion of the buildings of the new Nebraska State Fairgrounds, relocated from Lincoln to Grand Island in 2010<\/a> because of poor attendance. I better stop here before I say something about the best state fair in OUR state.<\/em><\/p>\n

Onawa, Iowa, August 7 \u2014<\/strong> For a day that didn’t really have a travel portion until 3 PM, it wasn’t a shabby trip at all. In fact, today had a little something from nearly every decade of the past 150 years.<\/p>\n

I had no idea how much time I would spend at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer<\/a>, but I couldn’t do anything until it opened at noon. That gave me time to check out the Seedling Mile and, get this, read the Sunday Omaha World-Herald<\/em> in the city park.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nWeed-strewn original concrete from the\u00a0Lincoln Highway Seedling Mile<\/a> on the east side of Grand Island, 100 years and nine months after it opened and 85 years after US 30 bypassed it.<\/em><\/p>\n

By the time the museum opened, it was a beautiful day. The museum itself took about an hour, with a downstairs temporary exhibit about the 150th anniversary of the Union Pacific and an upstairs collection of everyday life in the 1920s-30s. Then I found myself in an anachronistic situation \u2014 classic cars lining the streets of an 1890s pioneer village!<\/p>\n

\"IF\"Cherry, apple, cinnamon, and other flavors at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then I walked, or slightly rushed, through the Antique Auto and Farm Machinery exhibit building. If you have a child who loves tractors, or if you’re an adult who feels like a child when seeing lots of old tractors, this is a place you need to go. There’s even a Waterloo Boy among the machinery.<\/p>\n

\"counter07\"<\/p>\n

Route: US 30, US 281, US 34, US 81, US 275, NE 51, IA 175<\/p>\n

I was farther along than I had budgeted for the trip, and still had a day to go, so I used the late afternoon\/early evening to close a gap on US 81. That included passing through Columbus and seeing a place originally set aside to honor the native-son creator of the Higgins Boat that has expanded to become a park\/memorial for all veterans. (The Higgins Boat<\/a>, too, figures prominently in the waiting room of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.)<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nHiggins Boat at the veterans memorial in Columbus, Nebraska (hence the 1492 designation), where US 81 meets the Loup River.<\/em><\/p>\n

By getting to Onawa, I set myself up for a super-productive day, at least as far as my Iowa travels are concerned.<\/p>\n

While doing research for this leg of the trip, through an application for the Lincoln Highway in Nebraska on the National Register of Historic Places<\/a>\u00a0(large PDF), I learned something for my Council Bluffs Highway Chronology<\/a> page. The first four-lane divided highway in Nebraska was a 6-mile stretch of US 73\/75 to Fort Crook, later Offutt Air Force Base. It opened on Monday, December 8, 1941.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 7, 2016: This photo encompasses a significant portion of the buildings of the new Nebraska State Fairgrounds, relocated from Lincoln to Grand Island in 2010 because of poor attendance. I better stop here before I say something about the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8647"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8707,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8647\/revisions\/8707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}