Weather: sunny, becoming overcast
Distance driven: 253 miles
I got up at 7.30, and had breakfast in ``La Mariposa'' again before returning to the room to finish packing. I then headed downstairs, checked out, and sat around reading while waiting for my shuttle to appear.
It did so promptly at 9.30, and then took a circuitous route around various other hotels in the city, picking up no other passengers on the way. It turned out that the shuttle operated a bus-style scheduled service around the major hotels, but for whatever reason there were no takers for it today.
The shuttle took me back out to the airport, where I picked up the Alamo bus to their hire depot. Again, I was the only passenger. Hire arrangements were sorted out fairly quickly, and I went back outside to find the car. This was a Pontiac Grand Prix SE, with a modest little 3.1 litre V6 engine, and a boot just large enough to take my case and several more of similar size. I spent a few minutes checking out the various controls, realised an owners' manual might be useful but that there wasn't one, and went back to the hire desk to ask for one. Unfortunately they no longer provided them, presumably owing to people having a habit of walking off with them, so I was left to figure things out for myself, which was not entirely trivial with some things, such as the central locking.
I left the airport area and joined the toll road leading around to interstate I-26, heading northeast from Denver. This road turned out to be incomplete, and I discovered a certain lack of signage between the end of the toll road and the nearest interstate. Fortunately after a short detour I found my way on to it and settled down.
I turned off after an hour or so near the small town of Wiggins as a rest area with eating facilities had been signed. I found a sizable store attached to a garage which served various simple snack foods, and had a slice of pizza and a refreshing drink before continuing on my way.
Shortly after a contraflow running for several miles, I turned off to the north onto a less major road. This took me across the state border into Nebraska. I made a brief stop in the town of Sidney, partly in a vain attempt to clean the accumulated mess of dead insects off the windscreen, and continued north to the North Platte River valley, where I turned to the west.
I was now closely following the old Oregon Trail route, widely used by pioneers heading west from the mid-1840s until the coming of the first transcontinental railways. The trail started on or near the Missouri river, the Platte River being too shallow to be navigable, and followed the Platte across Nebraska, taking its north fork (the south fork heads through Denver), and then following other rivers towards the mountains.
The major challenge was to find a route through the Rockies, for most of their length across the continent a virtually impenetrable barrier. The key was the discovery of the South Pass route in southwestern Wyoming in the early nineteenth century, probably by fur-traders. This crossed the Continental Divide (the line separating the regions draining into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans) with such gentle gradients that it was barely noticed.
After South Pass, routes began to diverge, with Mormon settlers heading into the area around the Great Salt Lake and farmers heading northwest to the fertile regions of Oregon. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 prompted many to take a more southerly route across the Sierra Nevada in search of riches. But virtually all would pass along the North Platte valley route, where the first signs of the ending of the initial part of their journey, across the flat prairies, were the rock formations alongside the river.
I stopped at one of the more notable ones, namely Chimney Rock, a formation akin to some of the buttes of Monument Valley but taking the shape of an inverted funnel. The tall, thin pillar at its summit reminded early settlers of the factory chimneys of the east, and stood out well enough to be within sight for two or more days of their journey. Although since somewhat eroded by the forces of nature (and the occasional bullet!), it is in general little changed from the days of the trail, despite giving many early visitors the air of impending collapse owing to large cracks being very visible.
The visitor centre offered a display of life on the Oregon Trail and a video presentation about the rock and the many pioneers to pass it. The rock itself is not visible at close range, perhaps as an attempt to prevent the vandalism of the early days in which people would try to climb as high as possible to carve their names.
I continued along the road towards Scott's Bluff, another rock feature notable in the days of the trail some forty miles further on. The road ran alongside a railway line, evidently well-used by some colossal goods trains. According to the car odometer, one stationary train was over a mile and half (2.4 km) in length.
It was by now nearly 6.00 and I decided not to head on to Scott's Bluff that evening but to stop for the night. The small town of Gering (across the river from the larger Scottsbluff) offered some places to stay, and I tried a Microtel inn I had seen advertised from the roadside. This was thankfully not full of miniature sleeping-quarters but conventionally-sized motel rooms with all expected facilities.
After a rest I walked into the nearby town centre in search of somewhere to eat. This proved less than entirely trivial, without many places around and even fewer still open -- it took me a few days to appreciate that restaurants tend to close quite early in this part of the world. I found myself resigned to a pizza hut, in which I had a meal of spaghetti and garlic bread (having had pizza for lunch), not amazing but adequate. I returned to the motel as the place closed at 9.00, read and watched TV for a while and went to bed at 11.