Missouri River Travelogue: NE & IA

We detoured from our flexible Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail itinerary to visit Lincoln, NE, on our way from St. Joseph, MO, to Sioux City, IA, for the night. Here are a few highlights of our long midday break in Lincoln.

We parked in a public parking garage and took a walking tour of downtown, heading first to the impressive State Capitol building, then strolling down Centennial Mall full of memorials toward the university, where we stopped in at the Nebraska History Museum because it had a special exhibit on Japanese Americans (sponsored by Kawasaki). Nebraska had several POW camps during World War II, but no Japanese internment camps. Ben Kuroki, a nisei Boy from Nebraska, became a war hero, flying bombing missions over Europe, North Africa, and Japan, and writing a book about it published in 1946. In the Museum's gift shop we bought the book about Nebraska POW Camps that I blogged a bit about, and I browsed enough of Homesteading the Plains to buy a Kindle version so I could blog passages from it. I've blogged many passages from University of Nebraska Press books over the years, including several about baseball in Asia and Australia and a few in their Bison Books (general interest) series.

We were late getting out of Lincoln because we lost our car! We first looked in the wrong one of two similarly configured parking structures within two blocks of each other. When, after walking by each stall in all 6 floors, we asked about whether our car might have been towed, the attendants pointed us to the other structure two blocks away, where we found our car just where we had left it. After consoling ourselves with a late lunch, we lit out on I-80 and I-29 into Sioux City, IA, where we checked into Stoney Creek Hotel, a rustic, cowboy-themed midwestern chain we had never heard of before. It was pleasant enough, and convenient enough that we spent another night there on the way back down river. That night, we ate at Famous Dave's barbecue restaurant nearby, our last major overindulgence in meat on this trip.