We woke up to the sound of some really, really large trucks driving down the street directly next to our window. Like, 2 feet from our window. At 6:00am Central time, 4:00am Pacific time. Yuck. It was raining, and pretty steadily. We slowly got the rest of the crew up and had cereal for breakfast then started packing up.
Before anything was loaded back into the car, I drove down the road a little bit to the Bohemian One Stop to grab a bag of ice. While I was in the store, 2 more customers entered and both of the customers and the cashier knew each other - definitely small town living out here.
I got back and started putting the roof bag together, still in the constant downpour. By the time I was zipping the bag closed on the roof, there was a decent sized puddle inside the bag. Not ideal! Luckily, we finished getting the car loaded (inside and out) just in time for the rain to stop. Oh well!
We headed directly to the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. This is an active archaeological site. There was a Yellowstone
volcanic eruption like a zillion years ago that was several magnitudes larger than Mt St Helen's. The ash blew most of
the way across the country, but it dropped 1 foor worth of accumulation in Nebraska. Apparently a bunch of animals
inhaled the ash and, since it was essentially microscopic pieces of glass, the animals very quickly became very sick and
died over the course of about 2 weeks. During those 2 weeks, many of them were drawn to a nearby waterhole where they
then died and the ash preserved their bones, footprints, etc. It was pretty cool, and they had some paleontology interns
doing digging and answering questions. Highly recommend if anyone is in the area.
After that, we hopped in the car and drove. And drove. And drove... Today was about 400 miles. We had a few potty stops along the way, but not much else. We ended the day in an airport hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota