Day 35: Omaha

Posted by: Arin

This was the first morning in Omaha where I really slept in. The first two nights we had been sleeping in bedrooms upstairs, but Pam washed all the sheets after we left because her cousin was coming over so we slept on a big L-shaped couch in the basement. The reason I'm going into this is because there are no windows in the basement, so no sun to wake us up. I got up around 9:40 and headed upstairs.

To my surprise, only Brad was up there. I had thought that we were going to be cleaning up broken trees all day, and worried for a moment that everyone else was working while we were just sitting around. It turned out that there was a tree crew going around cleaning everyone's wreckage, so I sat down and ate the best scone I have ever eaten. 

There was a HUGE pile of wood chips in the driveway from the fallen conifer, and it was our job to spread them over a section of yard that was mostly mud. It was me, Brad, and Scott working as a three man team. We had one person scooping into the wheelbarrow, one person wheelbarrowing, and one person spreading the chips around the lawn. After a couple hours of hard work we had managed to cover that whole section of the yard, but had barely even made a dent in the wood chips. We were all fairly wet from the rain, so we went in to dry off and play some more ping pong. I lost every game to Scott again, he really is the best ping pong player I've ever played. He left for work, leaving Brad and I home with Pam for the day (Layne was already at work).

Most of the day was spent just sitting around, doing crosswords in the paper and being lazy. Layne got home and we ate pasta with homemade sauce and homemade bread. I'm definitely going to start baking bread; this family has been an inspiration for me in the way I want to live (and eat!).

Sarah from the bike shop had heard that we were in town still and invited us over to hang out! We thought about riding, but ended up getting a ride into town with Layne and Pam. They dropped us off and we ended up hanging out and drinking beers with her, her friend Tessie (sp?), and her boyfriend Eric. She's got this rad house with one issue: it's kind of slowly sinking so the floor is a little slanted. It was really awesome to get to hang out with them. We got to look at some of her bikes, including this awesome Rawland with a sweet saddlebag. 650b!

Thanks Sarah for having us over though! We'll definitely be back sometime.

Scott came by after work to pick us up. We were trying to make it to a movie that started at 9:15 (The Holy Mountain, a film from the 70's directed by Jodorowski), but Scott didn't get off of work until 9 and a little lollygagging on our part made sure we didn't get there until 9:45. Luckily the movie wasn't too plot-oriented and there was still an hour and a half left. It was a crazy movie!

We got back nice and late again, and after eating some ice cream (a nightly tradition for the three of us there) we all went to bed. We were finally going to continue our journey the next day.