Tour de Nebraska

I'm a little behind in my posts, so I'll try to catch up in the next couple of days...

The Tour de Nebraska was really great! The route basically circled my hometown this year, so the kids stayed with grandma and grandpa and they all came to visit us a couple of times.

The first two nights of the tour, we stayed in towns with wineries! Yeah - wineries in Nebraska - whodathunk?! The first winery wasn't spectacular, but that didn't stop us from splitting a bottle of wine that afternoon. The second winery, however, was really good. We, of course, felt it necessary to split another bottle of wine that second night and we ordered a case of it! We're pretty sure this tour was designed with us in mind. (Good thing we do so much "training" every evening here so that we could keep up with all the drinking during the bike ride.)

The third night we went out for a nice meal together - and split another bottle of wine. And the fourth night, we stayed in Wilber, Nebraska, the "Czech Capitol of the USA" (they even hold a "Miss Czech USA" pageant every year!). Of course, the evening was capped off with a traditional Czech meal and a couple of huge bottles of Czech beer.

Oh yeah, besides the drinking (which, of course, was the most important part) we also did some biking! It was beautiful and fairly challenging! For the first 2.5 days, there wasn't a stretch of flat ground to be seen. And the hills were pretty steep. I had trouble walking the 2nd and 3rd nights because my legs were so sore! But I got a massage on the 3rd night and that seemed to help my legs quite a bit for the 4th and 5th days.

So, yeah, the biking was really very nice. Most people think of bicycle tours as being in the California wine country, or Vermont, or some other spetacular place, but I'd have to say that this one is probably nicer than those places. There are no people in Nebraska, you know! No people = no cars! It was great. And the roads were nice, too - you know, no cars to mess up the roads! :)

And it was just so nice to visit all these tiny little towns in Nebraska - the Rotary Clubs and church groups staffed rest stops for us and we ate every day in whatever local bar was in town. It was pretty cool.

Definitely something we'd like to do again! And we're going to try to convince other people to come with us next time... Any takers?...