Road Trip to Nebraska for the Eclipse

We were in Nebraska for the eclipse last Monday having driven from Maryland --> Pennsylvania --> Ohio --> Indiana --> Illinois --> Iowa --> Nebraska on the two days prior to the eclipse. I am writing about the road trip to Nebraska today and will be posting about the rest of our eclipse adventure over the next week.  We started out very early last Saturday. Our only stop in Maryland was the South Mountain rest area which is becoming a familiar stopping point for us on the way to Pittsburg or State College.

On Saturday, we were heading to Pittsburgh to pick up our daughter along way. We stopped at the rest stop/welcome center to Pennsylvania then two service areas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s a scenic drive and I enjoyed a peanut butter cookie purchased at the North Midway stop. We arrived at the Pittsburgh (Squirrel Hill) apartment by mid-morning.

We were back on the road and into Ohio shortly. We stopped at rest areas along the toll road (fortunately our Maryland E-ZPass tags worked for the entire trip). The first two areas had a round area where there were several options for lunch; my daughter and I chose Panera Bread at the first stop and my husband got his McDonalds lunch at the second. The third stop had a barrel vault roof.

We continued into Indiana making a rest stop along the highway and then at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for a hike (more on that in a subsequent post) and then to our hotel in Lansing, Illinois. The next morning, we were off again after a hearty breakfast at the hotel. There were two rest stops as we crossed the state. There was a Monarch not quite warm enough to be fluttering around. It seemed to have lost a lot of scales since it looked more brown than orange.

Iowa has some themed rest stops depicting the history and energy production of the state. The tall white obelisk in the second picture is a blade of a wind turbine! The art work inside (glass etching and floor tile) was appealing.

And then we were in Nebraska – making one rest stop before arriving at our hotel in York, Nebraska. The day we arrive was clear but the forecast for eclipse day was lots of clouds. We were looking at maps and the track of the eclipse….trying to figure out whether we should head west or east on eclipse day.