Day 101 – Colorado to Nebraska

We haven’t found a whole lot of interesting things to do at this time of year in Colorado so far, and with time running away for us we decided that we’d head off today, hoping to reach to Nebraska though Kansas. Upon programming a place we wanted to visiting in Nebraska into the SatNav, it was decided that we would have to re-drive the majority of yesterday’s route and head back into Wyoming and then head east into Nebraska. As you can imagine we both felt rather disheartened by this and extremely disappointed. Trying to cheer ourselves up we knew that we wouldn’t have done Colorado justice or feel like that we could really tick this state off the list without at least sampling it.

So off we went for yet another brutal drive. Its hard when psychologically you’ve prepared for new scenery, but we can’t complain, every drive has had amazing thing to offer so let’s see whats in store for today. It turned out to be another long day, and yet another visually busy one. After making our way back past Denver and back out of Colorado to Wyoming though the snow, we started to hit beautiful green fields and windy roads. It has been a while since we’ve seen bare rock poking out of the undulating mountainous roadsides.

We noticed pretty early on that we had to keep a close eye out for the deer around these parts. They crazy things just love to run across the road just as you get to them, so it was a very high alert drive for poor Ben! Ben’s an amazing driver and I really have to commend him for such an undertaking with this trip, I have complete faith in him every day no matter what the challenge. These skills came into their own when a heard of deer suddenly made a break for it, during this little intermission I managed to get quite a nice picture of one of the deer. Having made it safely to the other side thanks to Ben’s emergency stop, the animal appeared to have a good look at us, from the safety of the field. 

We continued driving through the quiet farm land, when we turned the corner and all of a sudden the nicely tarmaced, or paved roads as they call it, here came to quite an abrupt end and we were driving across a pure dirt track, something we were not expecting. It was quite fun seeing the dirt kick up behind the truck, really made us feel like country folk. The truck of course handled the terrain really well, it was quite a freeing but tense drive. I imagine it’s a slightly worrying drive for anyone let alone two Brits, completely alone in the Prairie lands. In times like these all you can do is go with it looking forward to emerging back into some sort of civilization.

We did eventually arrive in a town called Harrison, which to be fair by the size of it you could call it more of a village. Not much was open and it was very quiet. We stopped at a nice looking hotel and hoped to find a room for the night, but unfortunately it was all locked up! A slight kink in the plan, seeing that there was something good to visit only 20 miles away we thought why not! Let’s make it before sundown and deal with the accommodation issue later. So that’s what we did, we drove the extra 20 miles south towards what’s known as the Agate Rock bed’s, about this time the sun was setting producing spectacular views all around! 

It looks like someone took some crayons to the sky, and created something amazing, it was particularly beautiful. We drove late into the night eventually finding a very welcoming place to stay.