So put your drinks up for Nebraska

As a kid, I passed through Kansas and Nebraska many times on family road trips to Missouri. Over Easter weekend I took my first-ever trip specifically to these corn belt states. I used many Counting Crows lyrics in my tweets and Gchat stati while I was there, so I'm switching things up and going with Lady Gaga for this post's title.

I flew into Kansas City and spent the night with my former college roommate Will, who's a grad student at the University of Kansas. (My flight out was uneventful, but through a series of coincidences I found out two days later that my flight attendant and I used to be neighbors--she took the spot of the girl who married the guy whose spot I took in the apartment I'm in now. Weird, huh?) The next morning Will and I made the three-hour drive from Lawrence to Omaha, where we met up with some other good friends from our college days, David and Marlene. To give you some context on who I'm talking about, and some insight into our friendship, peep these shots from Halloween 2003.

 

Will is the hobbit (I can't recall who that is in the Gandalf getup), and the Justice League includes me as Batman, David as Superman and Marlene as Catwoman (so much for preserving secret identities). David's brother Aaron was Robin.

I hadn't seen David and Marlene in three years or spent more than two hours or so at a time with Will in four years, so I was excited for this trip. D and M were fantastic hosts, arranging with their landlord for us to stay in an empty loft in their building. Will and I felt very hip, like sitcom characters, just using the term "loft," let alone living in one. Here we are on the roof of the building, with the Omaha skyline behind us.

 Back in our Provo days, we would mostly just talk and eat and hang out and watch TV, and there was a lot of that on this trip. I'll try to avoid going into excruciating detail on the food (like the excellent pulled pork sandwich and deep fried Monte Cristo I enjoyed, or the fact I spent three days in Omaha without eating a steak) and TV (I finally saw Nacho Libre and Hot Rod for the first time--why did I wait so long?) I consumed and just focus on the points of interest.

Omaha has 15 or 16 of these giant push pins throughout the city, marking the "points of interest" that tourists should check out. This one is outside of the visitors center at Winter Quarters. The center and accompanying tour were nice, but the LDS temple across the parking lot was much more impressive.

On the temple grounds there is a cemetery, with dozens of headstones and monuments honoring the hundreds of Mormon pioneers who lost their lives in this area, near the beginning of their trek to the West. Among the dead are some of the children of Stillman Pond, whose tale of endurance is the most gut-wrenching and inspiring of any pioneer story I've ever heard. You should all read it.

But moving on from death...I was surprised to find out that Omaha is the birthplace of many things. It's the birthplace of Malcolm X, and we visited the site on Malcom X Boulevard after eating at a seedy fried chicken place--it reminded me of Harlem! (My friend Erika, who is currently in a grad program at the University of Nebraska, met up with us there. She was instrumental in establishing the connection between me and the flight attendant, which happened right before I started choking and had to excuse myself to puke outside. No bathrooms in Time Out Fried Chicken. Sorry you guys had to witness that!)

Marlene also told us that Omaha (and more specifically this theater) is the birthplace of "indie" music. I dislike the label "indie," just as I don't care for the term "singer-songwriter." I'll have to blog about that some time.

Most importantly, I learned that Omaha is the birthplace of arguably the world's greatest sandwich, the Reuben! It was created at the Blackstone Hotel, which is now an office building, but a bar across the street sells one that they claim is made using the original recipe.

This shot of the wrong end of the sandwich shows that I'm clearly not a "foodie." This Reuben had big chunks of corned beef rather than sliced deli meat, and it was very good. Whoever came up with the idea, I will gladly try a Reuben practically anywhere.

Another "point of interest" is the controversial Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, connecting Omaha with Council Bluffs, Iowa, "the meth capital of the US" according to our hosts. I don't know if that is accurate, but Council Bluffs certainly has a negative reputation. But the bridge is nice.

Here I am at the world-famous "Two Corners."

We spent Easter Sunday there as well, attending church in their small branch, having an Easter egg hunt in their loft (seriously), and eating Easter dinner with David's parents and some other siblings. They're an awesome family and this was an awesome trip. Thanks to Will, David and Marlene for showing me some true Midwest hospitality. Hopefully I'll get to go back soon.