Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado

Sunday night, we stayed at Mike Canada's apartment on the north side of Chicago. On Monday morning, we woke up early, had a delicious breakfast at Stella's Diner and dropped Nikki off at the bus station.

It was time to say goodbye to Chicago and we started the long journey west. The rest of Illinois was uneventful and so was Iowa until we stopped at a great place called Wilton Candy Kitchen, which is an old fashioned ice cream parlor that has been open since 1860! In fact, it is the oldest ongoing Ice Cream Parlor in the world. I found it in the travel book I bought for the trip, Off The Beaten Path, and it was certainly worth stopping for. I had the maple pecan ice cream and Cara had a caramel malt, both which were served to us by the owners, an older couple named George and Thelma. They were both excited to hear that we had come all the way from Florida and were stopping there.

Then it was back to driving through cornfields for a while, until we stopped at Smashburger (a recommendation from Seth) for lunch in Des Moines. We had never been to one before and I was pleasantly surprised even with the good reviews I'd heard. I would say it is comparable to Five Guys but with a few more options and the burger I got was amazing.

Then we got back in the car and I found and booked a hotel in Omaha while Cara drove. When we got there, we brought our stuff in and relaxed a bit until we got picked up to go to dinner by Cara's friend Stephanie and her fiance Chris. We ate a sports bar called Old Chicago and had a great time hanging out with them.

The next morning we drove all the way through Nebraska. We drove past a truck carrying a few PODS... possibly ours on it's way to Portland!

We stopped for lunch at a Mexican place in North Platte called La Hacienda.

After lunch we continued driving with the goal of reaching Denver. However, when we got to Denver, neither of us were tired or hungry so we decided to push through and stay in Vail for the night. Vail is a little ski town about 2 hours west of Denver and it was a nice place to stop. We were right in the mountains and the elevation was just over 8,000 ft... a little different than Florida. We may have gotten a little carried away with taking pictures of the mountains, here are a few:

The next morning it was off to Salt Lake City, Utah and I will write about that in the next post.