Journey Home

Monday & Tuesday   July 10-11        Journey Home

CarHenge

We woke up Monday morning in Hot Springs SD.  Luckily it was not as hot as the day before.  We drove around the town a bit before leaving.  This town was built in the early 1900’s because of all the Hot Springs in the area.   All the buildings were made of red sandstone and town was built on the surrounding hills.  At one time there were eight hot springs hotels that offered “plunges” to take advantage of the medicinal advantages of the hot springs.

From here we headed south towards Nebraska.  We saw signs as we neared Alliance NE and couldn’t resist visiting CarHenge.  This structure was constructed by a local petroleum engineer, Jim Reinders,  who had spent seven years working in England.  When he returned to Alliance he decided to build and exact replica of Stonehenge.  Since Alliance didn’t have any large stones he decided to construct it from what the area had a  supply of:  old cars.  Carhenge is an exact replica of it’s English counterpart  with the cars lining up with the Summer and Winter Solstice.  The structure was completed in 1987 after 51 weeks of work.  The Willy’s Jeep was driven 1000 miles to be added to the group.  Besides Carhenge there are other metal sculptures made from all cars. 

Willy's Jeep at CarHenge

Bo & I enjoying the shade

Salmon with a carhood head

large dinosauer, there was a pigeon next in its mouth

Conestoga-Wagon 

At this point we headed southeast across Nebraska passing through the Sandhills that were filled with small lakes.  This 200 mile stretch of road had few inhabitants although it followed the train tracks and we joined numerous coal trains making the trek.  The lakes were filled with ducks, pelicans and other water birds.  We even spotted Glossy Ibis which are native to Florida and fly up to Nebraska to breed every Summer.

Sandhills of Nebraska

Coal Train - over 100 cars long

Lakes along the Sandhills

long straight roads of Nebraska

The trip took much longer than we expected and it turned into a 13 hour day before we arrived in Des Moines at 11:30 and called it a night.

We saw hundreds of Wind Generators while we were out West.  We saw at least two Wind Farms in Nebraska that had 100 generators each.  Here they were constructing a wind generator.  The tower is up and the blades are laying in front of it.

Large crane constructing the tower base

Tuesday morning we were anxious to get on the road but to our dismay the car had a dead battery.  Thanks to a manager that had a pair of jumper cables in his truck we were  back on the road within a few minutes.  We continued across Iowa and Illinois without shutting off the vehicle and arrived home at 9pm that night.