Gothenburg revisited

We are making another trip west, following the same route as we did when we first birthed this blog. Because of my naivity, I thought my blog had too much stuff on it, so I removed the first few posts. As time permits, I will repost those early ones as new posts for anyone who really wants to follow this from the beginning. (maybe 2 people???) On our first trip, we were traveling I-80 at the end of January, so the scenery was pretty stark. This time it is GREEN. Seeing horses and cattle grazing is a beautiful sight. So why did I choose Gothenburg as the starting point of this trip?  We spent our first night in Des Moines and honestly, for us there wasn't much to "write home about". so far. Gothenburg hold interest for 2 reasons. It was where the first Pony Express station was built and part of it still stands. We have pictures.  The most interesting note about the Pony Express is that as much notariety as is given to the Pony Express, it only ran for 18 months. Some presidents have served for 4 years and we don't know as much about them as we do the Pony Express. Here is the URL for Gothenburg's history site.  http://www.ci.gothenburg.ne.us/

The other reason Gothenburg sparked our interest is that Georgia's mom got her first teaching job in a one-room country school (12 grades) in Gothenburg. At the Pony Express station, we saw a museum across the street which we thought might have been the school, but we met one of the museum "committee" who was mowing the grass and found that it had been a "Plymouth meeting house" for a religeous group that settled here and built the meeting house. However, this guy (Dick Larson) was so nice that he gave us the e-mail address (oh, the museum was closed for the day) and name of the historian, so hopefully we can get some more information on that. He did say that at that time (1940) there were several country schools in the area, so we don't know if the building still stands or not. He took me inside to get some information, so I got to look around a bit.  We'll see where that takes us.

We "bunked" in North Platte last night in the same Hampton Inn we stayed in on our first trip. Right next to "Fort Cody".. We find it interesting that there is all this Buffalo Bill stuff here, yet, a post from last fall shows us in the midst of Cody stuff in Cody, Wyoming. I did fine out that Buffalo Bill Cody established a reputation of Western hospitality when he used his Scouts Rest Ranch here near North Platte as headquarters for his famous Wild West Show. .  Guess he got around. Tonight we hope to land in Rock Springs, Wyoming. That Hampton Inn holds a special place for us because we stayed there over a weekend coming home from our first trip out because a transfer case went out on our explorer and we had to be towed back to Rock Springs and wait for it to get fixed on Monday and Tuesday. The people there were wonderful to us. Today we begin our "suaree" in the Rockie Mountains. To us plains dwellers, this sounds exciting.