Thursday, June 5, 2008

Nebraska - Day 1

Today was our first full day in Nebraska. We started our day out with a trip to the Strategic Air & Space Museum, then detoured over to Lincoln, Nebraska for lunch in the Haymarket District, before returning to Omaha to visit Boys Town. Due to severe weather and tornado watches, we had dinner at a restaurant near the hotel and turned in early.

The Strategic Air & Space Museum was very cool. It actually reminded me a lot of the Udvar-Hazy museum in DC, because it consisted of big hangers with lots of huge aircraft. They had good descriptions, and a cool time line of the air industry. It was a little thin on space items - but it had a scale model of the ISS, which I enjoyed.
Lunch in Lincoln was nice - we ate at a bar & grill place in the Haymarket District. I had a Buffalo Reuben, which was pretty tasty. Jeff's meal came with hush puppies, which was fun, but unexpected for Nebraska. We drove around a bit and saw the University of Nebraska and the State Capital.
Our final tourist destination was Boys Town. Boys Town is basically a home for troubled children, which seemed like an odd tourist destination, but people had recommended it and it is a national historical site. It turned out to be very cool. In 1917, Father Flanagan decided to provide a home for boys that would otherwise have been sent to reformatories or prisons or for boys that were homeless. His idea was that no child was actually bad, and given help and love, they could be happy and successful. He started out with one house and 5 kids and expanded. Now Boys Town is a huge campus with its own high school and series of houses. We walked around the campus and saw the chapel (which was beautiful!), Father Flanagan's house, the Garden of the Bible (which has plants from the Bible in it as well as signs with scriptures), and the History Museum, which explains the history of Boys Town.
We had dinner at Spezia, an Italian restaurant near our hotel. Food was good, and now I'm feeling pretty full and pretty sure I should stop making excuses and go to the hotel work-out room. Looking forward to another good day in Omaha tomorrow!

1 comment:

kathleen said...

Hey! Consider yourself tagged! Questions are on my blog. :-)