Westward 2014: Nebraska

I was getting ready to write about my time in Salisbury and Stonehenge when I realized I had missed talking about the very last stop on my Westward adventure. And I must rectify this egregious error.

When I was in Limerick there was a ginger who lived 2 doors down from me. Her name was Sheridan. We became fast friends when our program sent us to London. When we got back to Limerick she started going to parties with me and we sat together in Irish Folklore and we talked about ho hot the teacher was. Seriously we both had perfect attendance for that class. So Sheridan had come to visit me twice in the years that followed Limerick. We got up to trouble in Atlantic City and we Bar Crawled LBI. Nebraska was a cheap plane ride from Salt Lake so obviously I had to go!

Now this will be quite short of pictures because I took a lot on my phone and they got lost. A moment of silence for my pictures please….

So back to Nebraska!

I land in Omaha and Sheridan picks me up! I was walking out of the airport about to call Sheridan to see where she was and then I see my ginger!! And life was good. Haha.

She took me into Omaha and we walked around a lot…

And I saw Iowa! Iowa guys! It was exciting!

Iowa is there on the other side of the bridge!!

It was also exciting to see… a black squirrel!

Then we went to play at a kids park. The slides were the best! Although I could have used some better pants that gave me more slide. 

But Sheridan did get my action dismount!

We had coffee and talked about all sorts of random and sexual things, like Sheridan and I always do.

Then it was off to her place. The next day we went to the State Museum on the University of Nebraska campus. And I learned some pretty cool things. Like the facts that Nebraska is known for their very intact elephant fossils. They essentially have a well preserved evolution of elephants. On one of the signs in the museum it says: Remnants of more than 10,000 extinct elephants have been found in Nebraska but less than 1% of the state has been carefully explored for fossils. Paleontologists estimate that at least 3,000 elephant fossils are still buried in the average square mile of Nebraska countryside- so if you live in this state, odds are about one in ten that you have on beneath your house!

Sheridan heads up I’m coming back to dig under your house!

We also saw an ancient camel skeleton.

So as you can see back in the day camels had boney humps. Now they’re not bony they’re fatty.

Now strap yourself in for some really cool information that I learned from the signs in with the dinosaur bones.

So this Stegosaurus was mounted in the 1930s. its tail is dragging along the ground, in keeping with the ideas of the time about the sluggish ways they moved. Recent reconstructions show the tail held high. The new pose is based on the 1992 discovery in Colorado of the most complete specimen ever found. All the bones were laid out as they were in life. Sorry for the shitty pictures but here’s a pictorial explanation of the old versus new way to lay out a Stegosaurus.

We saw some extinct specimen…

Then we walked around campus a bit and went to get more coffee. I love coffee! And The Mill is literally epic coffee!

While I was visiting Sheridan Scotland was having there referendum vote. Needless to say as the globe trotters we are we had to stay up and see where it went. So we got fancy beers, put on Cosmos and watched the live feed on BBC. It was actually great fun.

We hit up the Omaha Zoo!!!

I hadn’t been to a zoo since probably elementary school. I had so much fun running around seeing all the animals.

And we even took the skyride thingy and we got see everything from above!

And I was happy to see my favourite animal…

TIGERS!!!!

Bot gosh all the big cats were so pretty!

Oh and the PENGUINS!!!

Soooooo cute! I was like a little kid. I don’t know how Sheridan dealt with me.

The aquarium was pretty. So many colourful things.

Then we went into the butterfly house!

Then we got chatted up by this cute little prairie dog…

He was so social. Secretly I think he just wanted food.

Then we hung out with some lemurs…

Saw some sassy gorillas…

Walked through the rainforest…

Saw a cute baby!!!

Said hi to the giraffes who were inside because they were expanding their outside area.

Our last stops were the lions. The dude lion kept yawning and almost roaring because of the one female lion who was just laying about in his space.

And finally the bears.

I would love to tell you about the State Capitol building but alas those photos are all gone. Damn phone! So that’s out of the post, sadly.

My last day there we stopped at a pretty garden and took classy pictures. Sheridan got better ones because she’s seriously pro level at photography. Here are my wanna be photos.

And then I had to jet home. It was really awesome to hang out with Sheridan. The one down side of the whole trip… Leonardo di Catrio… Sheridan’s evil cat! But he didn’t put too much of a dampener on my stay. Cats just really creep me out and Leo was one of those cats that just stares!

I will have to go back to Nebraska to see if I can dig up some elephant fossils…

Cheers,