Day 5 - Part 1 - Nebraska and Missouri

Well I never imagined I would long for the salad days of Delta CO's Riverwood RV park.  We left North Platte last night and decided to head as far east as we could stand.  We succumbed in Grand Island, NE, where we landed at the Rodeway Inn, quite late.  Upon checking in we decided we had to get the hell out as soon as possible, but much to our chagrin, just like North Platte, not a single establishment was open, not even the Appleby's near the freeway, which was guaranteed to be open.

So we foraged on almonds, a tangerine and cookies left over in the car, and called it a day.

I woke up to the sun on the North Platte river.

And about 4 minutes after that we were back on the road.
Eastern Nebraska turned out to smell a lot less like methane than the Western side did, and it offered up the same endless, lovely prairie.

We made it to Lincoln, NE and had a delicious farm-to-table breakfast, and soon after stopped in Nebraska City to visit John Brown's cabin and underground railroad.  John Brown was an abolitionist credited as a major cause of the outbreak of the Civil War, as he believed the only way to overthrow slavery was by violent Revolution.  After inciting a slave revolt at Harper's Ferry, he was tried and hanged for treason, but ran an integral part of the railroad movement out of this cabin up until his death.

We also went by this weird desk headstone grave site Tom wanted to visit.  As he said "worked to death".  But the woman buried here was 107 years old, so maybe she just lived to death and had a strange affinity for her writing desk.

Next stop was St. Joseph, MO, where I've wanted to go since I saw Paper Moon forever ago.  It seems that the whole of Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, have deserted.  Maybe everyone was just coincidentally out of town for the long weekend, or maybe there was a zombie apocalypse we missed, but seriously, these states have just emptied out.  This is the entrance to downtown.

It turns out that while there are no people in St. Joe's, there is a cool Pony Express Museum, a Wild West Museum called the Pattee House, and it's where Jesse James spent his final days until he was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford.

Our dead outlaw gravestone tour continued with Jesse James' headstone. 

And the house in which he was killed. 

Although we could have spent days in St. Joe's, we ran through the highlights in a couple hours until we were too behind and hungry to ignore, so decided to hit the road again for lunch in Kansas City...